Astrophiz101 - Prof Melanie Johnston-Hollitt

Astrophiz 101: Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt - Directing the Murchison Widefield array Our feature interview this month is with Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, Director of the Murchison Widefield Array & Research Professor based in Western Australia. Melanie manages large-scale, multinational research infrastructure, is regularly involved with international science diplomacy, and she regularly gives advice and consultancy for Governments. Her research specialises in Radio Astrophysics, Telescope Design, and Scientific Visualization. You will love hearing about her work using the sky as a big data archive, the cosmic web, chasing the EOR, colliding galaxy clusters and science as a human endeavour! So cool & exciting In a world that’s changing rapidly, we are making a change to our podcast format so you’ll keep getting a fresh Astrophiz every 2 weeks. We are splitting our content so one episode each month will be dedicated to a new guest interview, from the fields of radio astronomy, optical astronomy, space science or particle physics, Also each month you will get to hear from your regular presenter Dr Ian ‘Astroblog' Musgrave, who will preview a sky Guide for you for the coming month, and he will also take you on an astronomical journey of discovery in ‘Ian’s Tangent’. In our next interview-only episode, we talk with Clint Jeffrey, an amateur radio astronomer who works on the technologies for an 8,5metre dish constructed by the radio astronomy section of the astronomical society of Victoria in Australia. The dish is located in a quiet zone in a rural area about 130km north of Melbourne, and they have just achieved ‘First Light’ with a successful observation of the redshift of the Small Magellanic Cloud, and captured the galactic hydrogen inside the Milky Way.