Dr. Adi Foord is an assistant professor in the Physics Department at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). She completed her M.S. at the University of Michigan in 2017 and subsequently received
her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Michigan in 2020. Her dissertation, “Discovering the Missing Population of AGN Pairs with Chandra”, won the 2020 Proquest Distinguished Dissertation Award. She then spent 3 years as a Porat postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University before joining UMBC in 2023. Dr. Foord’s research focuses on observational flags of merger-driven SMBH growth, or dual AGN, which are signposts of ongoing galaxy formation and represent rare instances where the link between environment and black hole growth (or lack thereof) can be probed. As an observational astronomer, Dr. Foord uses X-ray observations (Chandra, XMM-Newton, Swift) to observe accreting supermassive black holes and connects their X-ray activity to the emission of their host galaxies (in optical and IR, with telescopes such as SDSS, HST, and JWST).
Dr. Nico Cappelluti is an assistant professor at the Physics Department of the University of Miami. He obtained his PhD in 2007 through the International Max-Planck Research School (IMPRS) at the Technische Universität of Munich (TUM) Germany, working on the COSMOS survey at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestial Physics (MPE). He has been the YCAA prize fellow at Yale University. He is interested in employing wide-field multiwavelength surveys for finding observational proxies of the formation mechanisms of supermassive black holes in the Universe, determining the origin of cosmic backgrounds, studying active galactic nuclei (AGN) clustering and investigate the nature of dark matter.
Marta Volonteri has been a Directrice de Recherche, CNRS, France since 2012. She received her Ph.D. degree in Astronomy from the University of Milan, Italy in 2003. She was an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Michigan from 2010 to 2011 and an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan from 2007 to 2010. Her research interests include: Theory: galaxy formation, formation and evolution of massive black holes, accretion physics, stellar dynamics, gravitational waves; Observations: high-redshift universe, galaxy evolution and active galactic nuclei.
