Julien Girard recruited as lecturer at AIM

Julien Girard was recruited as a lecturer at AIM for the study of transient sources of high energy thanks to large radio observatories such as SKA and its precursors (LOFAR, MeerKAT).

Julien Girard made a thesis in transient radio astronomy (planetary and exoplanets radio imaging) at the Observatoire de Paris (LESIA). He subsequently came to AIM as a post-doctoral researcher in the UnivEarthS Project “The Transient catastrophic Universe”, to work on the adaptation of parsimonious reconstruction methods (developed by Jean-Luc Starck’s team at the LCS ) to the problem of radio interferometry. As a result of this work, he was awarded a SKA postdoctoral fellowship in South Africa (Rhodes University / SKA South Africa) to continue his imaging work on the SKA radio telescope under construction.

He now joins the LEPCHE team (led by J. Rodriguez) to bring his scientific expertise (radio transients) and technique (interferometry, parsimony) to the study of high energy transient phenomena in the perspective of use of new major observatories by 2020.

parcimonie  Parsimony: Figure extracted and adapted from Garsden et al. 2015, Girard 2016, showing the results of parsimonious reconstruction on the source Cygnus A (LOFAR data) in comparison with contours coming from VLA observation at higher frequencies.

 

ska-meerkat

SKA-MeerKAT: Artist’s view of MeerKAT, the precursor of SKA1-MID, which entered the commissioning phase.