TGF Fellows 2024

Aldana Griechener is an Israeli astronomer who will receive her PhD from the Israel Institute of Technology in 2024. In autumn 2024, she will move to the University of Arizona in Tucson as a Steward Observatory Prize Fellow in Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics. She will investigate the electroweak and gravitational signatures of the events that lead to the formation of the heaviest elements in the Universe and assess the contribution of massive stars and binary systems to the r-process enrichment over cosmic time. She plans to use the grant to pay for priority supercomputer access, conference attendance, and publication costs.

Aldana Griechener

Jonathan Alexander Quirola Vásquez is an astronomer from Ecuador who received his PhD in 2023 from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he is now a postdoctoral fellow. He also holds a research position at the Escuela Politécnica Nacional-Astronomical Observatory of Quito, Ecuador. In 2024, he will start a three-year postdoctoral position at the Department of Astrophysics, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research will focus on unravelling a new type of transient population: the Fast X-ray Transients (FXT) detected by Chandra, XMM-Newton, and Swift-XRT. To determine the nature and the progenitors of the FXTs, and their cosmic rates, he will identify their host galaxies and follow their contemporaneous counterparts using multi-wavelength facilities. He plans to use the grant to pay for conference travel, conference attendance, research and observing visits, and publication costs.

Jonathan Alexander Quirola Vásquez

Honghui Liu is a Chinese astronomer who will receive his PhD from Fudan University, China, in June 2024. On 1 September 2024, he will start a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen, Germany. His research will focus on the study of accreting compact objects with X-ray observations. Starting with the development of a fully self-consistent reflection model of X-ray binaries (XRBs), he will then use the constraints given by polarimetric and spectroscopic measurements to derive the best coronal geometry. He plans to apply his model to archival data from simultaneous IXPE, NuSTAR/Insight-HXMT observations of XRBs. This approach will pave the way for future observations by X-ray polarimetric missions. He plans to use the grant to attend conferences, invite and visit collaborators, and purchase computer equipment.

Honghui Liu