Congratulations to Dr. Natalia Lewandowska who is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of Astronomy in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Haverford College, near Philadelphia, PA.
Natalia worked in the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology as a Postdoctoral Researcher while also playing an integral role in the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) as program director and staff member.
In the PSC, she organized online workshops and the Capstone while also developing projects for students related to radio giant pulses and Linux tutorials.
She is also extensively involved in NANOGrav where she is currently working on the polarimetry of single pulses of PSRJ1713+0747 and PSRB1937+21 alongside her collaborators, Dr. Maura McLaughlin and Dr. Timothy Dolch.
Her research focuses on multiwavelength studies of pulsars in order to find out how they generate their emission. As a part of that goal she also studies a specific form of irregular radio emission known as 'giant pulses'. Astonishingly, only a handful of pulsars (with different evolution histories) show that kind of emission which is an observational fact that we still do not understand. Simultaneous observations of such pulsars at different wavelengths can unravel potential emission mechanisms and explain what giant pulses are and why they occur only in certain pulsars.
As a member of the NICER Collaboration (NICER is an X-ray instrument which is mounted on the International Space Station and was built solely for the observations of neutron stars) she is currently studying pulsars which emit giant pulses at radio and soft X-rays, searching for a correlation between both.
Natalia earned her PhD in 2015 from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. Her thesis was focused on a multiwavelength study of radio giant pulses from the Crab pulsar. She observed the Crab pulsar simultaneously with radio telescopes as well as Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) and searched in the resulting data for a correlation between radio giant pulses and gamma-ray emission from the Crab pulsar.
She will be greatly missed and we wish her well in her new role!