My academic history

I am a (full) Scientist in Astronomy in the Science Support and Research Division of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory I am a Group Lead and the Head of the Jansky Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, NM-local coordinator of the NRAO/GBO summer student program, I organise a number of user support training events and workshops (just like the famous NRAO summer school on synthesis imaging), and I help astronomers from anywhere in the world to use the VLA and VLBA. From the technical telescope support side, I work on the VLA primary calibration for science. I have been with NRAO since 2018, and I am based predominantly in Socorro, NM (although I do visit NRAO on the east side of the country quite often).

Outside of the NRAO work, I am a Project Manager (and webmaster) of the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) all-sky radio survey being executed with the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), and I am leading its radio-loud AGN science. I have held this position since 2014, and I am thrilled that almost a decade later we are finally looking into real EMU data.

In 2022-2025 I served on the Editorial Board of the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA), as an Associate Scientific Editor. PASA is a small peer-review journal in astronomy and astrophysics, but a very influential one, and I encourage everyone to consider submitting their scientific articles to PASA. Published by the Cambridge University Press, PASA is a Q1 journal, with 2022 impact factor of 6.3. My three-year term finished just recently, and while I loved the work and supporting our journal, I decided to take a break from the editorial work for a little while to focus on other things that have been fighting for my attention meanwhile. Some of those other engagements include supporting early career researchers through my serving on the American Astronomical Society's Advisory and Prize Committees.

Postdoctoral years

2012-2017

I was a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at The University of Western Australia (UWA), and a CAASTRO Postdoctoral Scientist (Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics). Together with fellow researchers at the Curtin University node of ICRAR at the Curtin Institute for Radio Astronomy, and Prof. Lister Staveley-Smith (UWA) I worked on the execution, delivery and scientific expoitation of the Galactic and Extragalactic All Sky MWA (GLEAM) radio survey as a part of its core team.

Before that, I was a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, where I worked on the very first activities of the international LOFAR baseline observations (specifically focusing on developing first low radio frequency global fringe fitter for LOFAR), and early cycles deep all-sky surveys with Dr. David Bacon and Dr. Alejandro Martinez-Sansigre. I was a member of the core teams for both international LOFAR and deep surevys collaborations.

Education

2001-2012

I spent my advanced training years within the Astronomy Group at the University of Southampton in the UK, where I was a doctorate student. I worked under the supervision of Dr. Tom Maccarone, taken over from Dr. Phil Uttley, on the evolution of radio galaxies and radio-loud quasars. This computational project was initially started with Dr. Christian Kaiser, and was funded by The Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant. I graduated with PhD in Physics (Astrophysics) in 2012.

And finally, my initial steps in astronomy and astrophysics happened at the Astronomical Observatory of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland (BSc and MSc), and at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy (API) at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (MSc). At API I worked under the supervison of Dr. James Miller-Jones and Prof. Ralph Wijers on low frequency radio observations of X-ray binary star systems.