Join us for an exciting night of talks about astronomy at our seventh event of Astronomy on Tap Triangle, our North Carolina chapter of short, engaging talks about astronomy over beer! Our events are free and open to all ages, held at the taproom of Fullsteam Brewery in Durham, NC.
On Tuesday April 3 we’ll hear from two nuclear astrophysicists in the Triangle who spend their time thinking about the origins of life’s elements created in the cosmic furnaces of stars: Dr. Christian Iliadis*, Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dr. Richard Longland, Assistant Professor of Physics at North Carolina State University**. Both will regale us with stories of nucleosynthesis — or how the elements that make up the periodic table came into being.
*Dr. Christian Iliadis is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Iliadis is a world expert on nucleosynthesis, and is author of Nuclear Physics of Stars, a widely used textbook on the subject. Dr. Iliadis obtained an undergraduate degree from Universität Münster and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame. Before joining the faculty at UNC in 1996 he was a postdoctoral fellow at TRIUMF, Canada’s premiere particle accelerator. In 2014 he was awarded the University of North Carolina Board of Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
**Dr. Richard Longland is an an Assistant Professor of Physics at North Carolina State University. Dr. Longland over-arching research goal is to understand the origin of the elements and how stars burn their fuel. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Surrey, England and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Longland then did postdoctoral research at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, and returned to the Triangle for postdocs at UNC and NC State before joining the faculty at NC State in 2014. Dr. Longland used to be sponsored as a mountainboarder, and competed worldwide (photographic evidence).
Our FREE Astronomy on Tap events feature accessible, engaging science presentations on topics ranging from planets to black holes to the beginning of the Universe. There is always lots of time to ask questions and interact with the presenters and other scientists who inevitably stick around for the beer.
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