Alumni

Krzysztof was born in Barlinek. He obtained his master's degree in astronomy from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń based on the work on astrometry of visual binaries with adaptive optics. In 2006 he started PhD studies at the NCAC Toruń, working on low-mass stars in binaries, under the supervision of Prof. Maciej Konacki. He obtained his PhD in October 2010, and immediately started his post-doc position at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile. He extended his work on eclipsing binaries to other types of stars, and established the Comprehensive Research with Echelles on the Most interesting Eclipsing binaries (CREME) project, aimed at looking for and characterizing rare, unusual, and otherwise valuable stellar pairs. This work has been continued during his second post-doctoral term, at the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. In 2016 Krzysztof came back to where he started - Toruń - to continue his work at the NCAC branch.

He is broadly interested in eclipsing binaries, their observations and modelling, as well as looking for planets around them. During his time in Chile and Hawaii, Krzysztof was also working in several large international collaborations, like the Vista Variables in Via Lactea (VVV), Strategic Exploration of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru (SEEDS) or the Hyper-Supreme Cam (HSC) consortium, as well as helped in several other projects (e.g. HAT-South, Kepler). He is also involved in the Solaris project, namely in the search for circumbinary bodies with eclipse timing variations. He continues his work on precise characterization of eclipsing binaries, focusing on the satellite-borne observations with TESS and (future) PLATO missions. He is also one of the most active Polish astronomers in terms of proposals submitted to ESO.

His favorite aspect of the astronomer's job are the travels. Apart from Chile and Hawaii, his work duties (observations, conferences, scientific collaborations) took him for example to Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, or Japan.

Radek Wojtak studied astronomy at the Jagiellonian University. His PhD research undertaken in the NCAC was focused on developing new dynamical models of galaxy clusters for the purpose of constraining dark matter content in these objects. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in 2010 and then he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Niels Bohr Institute (DARK excellence centre) at the University of Copenhagen and Stanford University. In 2017 he returned to the Niels Bohr Institute, where he is currently an associate professor. His current scientific interests include topics such as dark matter and dark energy, cosmological simulations, gravitationally lensed supernovae and observational tests of cosmological models. He is a member of the Young Supernova Experiment transient survey, where he leads a group searching for gravitationally lensed supernovae. He is also co-coordinating establishing a data centre of the Rubin Observatory (LSST) in Denmark.

Krzysztof Nalewajko grew up in Ostróda, at high school he was a winner of the national astronomical olympiad. He studied astronomy at the University of Warsaw and went on to CAMK for Ph.D. studies, working on the topics of dissipation in relativistic jets of active galaxies and non-thermal emission of blazars under the supervision of Prof. Marek Sikora. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in 2011 and went on for postdoctoral positions in the USA. He spent 3 years at the University of Colorado Boulder, working with Profs. Mitchell Begelman and Dmitri Uzdensky on relativistic magnetic reconnection and kinetic plasma simulations. In 2013 he was awarded the NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. He then spent 1 year at the Stanford University, working with Profs. Roger Blandford and Grzegorz Madejski. In 2015 he returned to CAMK for a tenure-track position, obtained habilitation in 2017 and became a tenured institute professor in 2018. He continues working on kinetic simulations of relativistic magnetic reconnection, utilizing the largest Polish supercomputers. Official website: https://users.camk.edu.pl/knalew/

Aleksander Sądowski studied accretion flows on black holes through numerical simulations. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and an Einstein Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He developed KORAL - one of the most sophisticated, at that time at least, numerical codes for performing radiative simulations of magnetohydrodynamical flows in strong gravitational fields. Currently, he is a senior quantitative researcher at Akuna Capital where he optimizes algorithms trading in financial markets.

Arek studied astronomy at the Adam Mickiewicz University, and wrote his master's thesis at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn. He received his PhD at NCAC in 2014 with a thesis on blue stragglers in globular star clusters. Since then, star clusters have become his main scientific interest. He is one of the developers of the MOCCA code that can be used to perform detailed numerical simulations of star clusters of any size. In addition, he is interested in distributed data analysis. He develops BEANS software, which he uses on a daily basis to analyze hundreds of terabytes of MOCCA data. Arek worked as a postdoc in Leiden and in Poznań, he collaborated with other scientists in the USA, UK, China and Germany, and now is back at the NCAC in Warsaw.

Magdalena Otulakowska-Hypka completed her master's studies at the A. Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań and doctoral studies at N. Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw on the topic of dwarf novae. She spent some time on research collaboration in the field of close binary stars in several foreign astronomical institutes: in Bonn, Nice, NYC, Leiden, and Garching. In the meantime, she's had two wonderful children and is now working hard to combine family life with science. She works at AMU, and her main scientific interests are now symbiotic stars and novae.

Milena was born and grew up in Poznań, where she graduated from Adam Mickiewicz University. She received her PhD degree from CAMK PAN in Toruń under the supervision of prof. Maciej Konacki. During her PhD studies she was actively involved in the Solaris project by setting up a network of robotic telescopes in the southern hemisphere. As a post-doc at the University of Wrocław, Milena started the collaboration with the BRITE consortium, which uses a constellation of nano-satellites to observe the brightest stars in our Galaxy.

Milena works at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw as a member of the OGLE group - a large-scale photometric sky survey. Her scientific interests include variable stars, especially binary systems, as well as pulsating stars.

Apart from scientific interests, Milena is actively involved in many outreach activities. She communicates science via public talks, visiting schools, writing popular-science articles, reviewing books, and designing space-related games. She is also a Polish node representative of several international sci-comm projects and the Executive Secretary of the Polish Astronomical Society.

Bhupendra Mishra grew up in a small town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. He obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Ewing Christian College, Allahabad, India. He did his M.Sc. in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in 2012. Soon after M.Sc. he joined as a first foreign national PhD student of CAMK in 2012. He worked with Prof. Kluzniak and completed his PhD in 2017 on some of the first global 3D GRMHD models of thin accretion disks. He joined his first postdoc with Prof. Mitch Begelman at University of Colorado Boulder USA in 2017 and further studied strongly magnetized accretion disk models. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Lab, Los Alamos, USA and  working on MHD-PIC models and also global GRMHD models of AGN accretion disks.

Abbas Askar was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, where he completed his primary and secondary education. Following the completion of his schooling in 2006, he was awarded a scholarship to attend University College Utrecht (UCU), the international honours college of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Abbas graduated from UCU in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science (in physical sciences: astrophysics, mathematics and physics) and a Bachelor of Arts (in humanities: philosophy, religious studies and history) degree. In spring 2010, he spent a semester studying philosophy in a masters programme at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 2010, he was selected and awarded a scholarship for the inaugural edition of the Astromundus (Erasmus Mundus) Joint Masters Degree programme in Astronomy and Astrophysics which was offered by a consortium of 5 European universities. During this programme, Abbas studied at the universities of Innsbruck (Austria), Padova (Italy) and Belgrade (Serbia). Towards the end of 2013, he joined the CAMK PhD program to work under the supervision of Prof. Mirek Giersz. For his PhD research, he used computer simulations to investigate the evolution of black hole populations within dense and massive star clusters. He is a part of the MOCCA code development team led by Prof. Giersz at CAMK. Following the completion of his PhD degree in 2018, Abbas joined Lund University in Sweden on a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Carl Trygger Foundation for Scientific Research. As of 2023, he is employed as a researcher in Astrophysics at Lund University. His research interests include understanding the formation, retention and growth of black holes within dense star clusters; the formation of gravitational wave sources and compact object binaries; and the co-evolution of nuclear star clusters and supermassive black holes.

Tek Prasad Adhikari was born and grew up in Ilam, a small hilly region of Eastern Nepal. He obtained his B.Sc. in Physics from Mechi Multiple Campus of Tribhuvan University located at Bhadrapur, Nepal. He completed his M. Sc. in theoretical physics at the Central Department of Physics, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, and later joined as a PhD student at CAMK in 2013. During his PhD studies he worked with Prof. Agata Rozanska on various aspects of emission and absorption properties of Active Galactic Nuclei environment. Later in 2018, he received his PhD degree and he is currently working as a post-doctoral fellow at the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, India. His current research interest is mainly focussed on building a synergy between the photoionization models and X-ray/optical observations of absorption and emission clouds present in the AGN systems. Apart from the research activities, Tek is interested in communicating science among the public and school students by writing popular articles and giving popular talks at the schools of remote areas of Nepal.