Honorary doctorate for Natascha Förster Schreiber
MPE astronomer Natascha Förster Schreiber will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Bath. With this most prestigious accolade of Bath University, Förster Schreiber is recognized not only for her distinguished career and for the breadth of her research but also for her support of the Bath Astrophysics Group since it was established. The award ceremony will take place in early July at the University of Bath.
From the launch of the Astrophysics Group as part of the physics department at Bath in 2015, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and Natascha Förster Schreiber, in particular, have maintained close links with colleagues there. Stijn Wuyts, who was at MPE from 2010 to 2015, is a long-term collaborator of the MPE Infrared group and, more recently, Hendrik van Eerten and Patricia Schady also moved from MPE to Bath. The Astrophysics Group at Bath hosts observers, theorists and instrumentation specialists, studying exploding stars, growing galaxies and feeding black holes in an expanding Universe. In particular, galaxy formation and evolution are common topics and there are regular visits in both directions to continue work on joint projects and add more detail on large-scale observational campaigns.
The Canadian-German researcher Natascha Förster Schreiber completed her PhD in Astrophysics at MPE in Garching and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich in 1999, on “Near-infrared imaging spectroscopy and mid-infrared spectroscopy of M82: revealing the nature of star formation activity in the archetypal starburst galaxy” in 1999. After post-doctoral positions at the Service d'Astrophysique in Saclay, France, and at Leiden Observatory, in the Netherlands, she returned to MPE in 2004 as research associate, shifting her focus to the formation and evolution of galaxies 3 to 6 billion years after the Big Bang. She has been notably using the SINFONI and KMOS instruments largely built by MPE and operating at the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory. In 2008, she was appointed as Minerva Fellow of the Max-Planck-Society and since 2013 she is a tenured senior scientist in the MPE Infrared group.