We are excited to announce that we will be joined by a new postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Francesco Cavallaro, who will be based at the University of Cape Town. Dr. Cavallaro will be working with the ThunderKAT, MIGHTEE and MeerLICHT projects on research into stellar radio emission.
Dr. Cavallaro joins us from Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Catania, Sicily, where he worked on several data intensive large programs related to Galactic radio sources with SKA pathfinder telescopes. Dr. Cavallaro will join the MeerKAT MIGHTEE large survey project, which is carrying out deep, wide-area, full-polarization imaging of selected extragalactic fields, and the ThunderKAT large survey project which is undertaking fast imaging with MeerKAT to search for transient and variable radio sources. During night time observations, simultaneous wide field, multiband optical observations are obtained with the MeerLICHT telescope at Sutherland.
Dr. Cavallaro will work with MIGHTEE, ThunderKAT and MeerLICHT data sets to search for and characterize stellar sources of transient and persistent radio emission in the microJy and sub-microJy flux density regimes and will undertake independent research programs utilizing the data. Dr. Cavallaro will also be involved in developing the symbiosis between MeerKAT and MeerLICHT data, such as developing combined radio-optical transient and/or stellar source identification and classification techniques. Dr. Cavallaro will also be involved with postgraduate students’ supervision and outreach activities at the University of Cape Town.
We look forward to the contribution of Dr. Cavallaro, and to the continued development and growth of our interest in combined radio-optical transient and stellar source identification and classification techniques. We wish Dr. Cavallaro well during his tenure.