Profile

Sera Markoff is Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Following her PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics from the University of Arizona in 2000, Sera held a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (Germany) and a National Science Foundation Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT (USA). In 2006 she started as faculty at UvA, where she has received NWO Vidi (2007) and Vici grants (2015), as well as an EU Marie Curie ITN (2008). She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014, and a Tinsley Centennial Visiting Professor at UT Austin in 2015.

Research and Teaching

Sera studies accretion processes around compact objects. Most recently she strives to understand how black holes release and channel energy into various forms such as radiation, high-energy particles and outflows, and how these outputs impact their surroundings. Sera’s research straddles theory and observation, and astrophysics and astroparticle physics; she is also an active member of GRAPPA. She enjoys teaching and has implemented several interactive techniques in her BSc course “Introduction to
Cosmology” and MSc course “High-Energy Astrophysics: Radiative Processes and Relativistic Flows”. She is a science WG coordinator for the next-generation TeV facility Cherenkov Telescope Array, and sits on the Science Council of the Event Horizon
Telescope.

Keywords

Compact objects, accretion physics, jets and particle acceleration, multimessenger signals.

Website and group blog

www.seramarkoff.com