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Welcome to the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, located within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Spotlight: Prof. Selma de Mink
Selma de Mink joins the Astronomy Department as Associate Professor in August this year. Currently she resides at the ‘Anton Pannekoek’ Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and the GRAPPA institute for Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics at the University of Amsterdam and PI of the BinCosmos group. De Mink obtained her degrees at the University of Utrecht where she completed her PhD thesis under supervision of Dr. O. R. Pols. She took a short postdoc at the Argelander Institute in Bonn with Prof. Dr. N. Langer, before moving to the US for a NASA Hubble Fellowship. In 2013 she moved to California, to take an Einstein & Carnegie-Princeton (Lyman Spitzer) Fellowship to work at The Carnegie Institution for Science and Cahill institute for Astronomy (Caltech).
She returned to the Netherlands in 2014 as a MacGillavry Fellow and Marie Curie Fellow at Amsterdam. In 2017 she was awarded Merac early career award in theoretical astrophysics and recently the Pastoor Schmeits Prize. The big question that drives her work is the question about our own Cosmic History. How did (massive) stars help to transform the pristine, dark and hostile Universe that was left after the Big Bang into the modern, diverse and precious Universe in which we live today?