Renee Ludlam was awarded a NHFP/Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship.  She will take this coveted fellowship to Caltech, to continue her work on neutron stars.  Even this underplays her success, as she was also awarded two other prized fellowships that she had to decline.  Well done, Renee!

Jon has been appointed as to Co-Chair the NASA Athena Study Team. Led by ESA and with contributions from NASA, Athena is a major X-ray telescope scheduled for launch in 2028. The AST will coordinate US scientific inputs into the mission.

Optical monitoring of massive black holes is able to measure distances within the accretion flows, and to deduce the mass of the black hole.  We have recently found that the same technique is viable using narrow Fe K emission lines in X-rays, potentially making it possible to measure black hole masses in many, many galaxies

Dr. Bailey Tetarenko, the Department of Astronomy McLaughlin Fellow, has arrived from Albert and is getting straight into work with Gemini and Magellan. Dr. Elias Kammoun has arrived from SISSA in Italy, and is jumping on studies of quasars and Seyfert-2 AGN. Dr. Abigail Stevens, an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow,  has arrived from

Recent work by Jon concerning a very rapidly spinning black hole has been featured on AAS/NOVA.  The research made use of the new NICER experiment aboard the International Space Station. A Rapidly Spinning Black Hole with a Warped Disk

Undergraduate researcher Anthony Morales, currently working on X-ray and UV light curves of AGN, has been awarded the Bodine Scholarship from the Department of Physics.

Bailey Tetarenko will join the group in Fall 2018, having won the Department’s McLaughlin Fellowship.

NASA has named Jon as one of five US “Participating Scientists” in the XARM mission, a partnership of JAXA, NASA, and ESA that will launch an X-ray calorimeter spectrometer in 2021.