COSMIC MAPS Talk Series with Dr. Bruce Macintosh & Dr. Natalie Batalha

836M is excited to partner with The David Rumsey Map Center and Stanford Libraries on Cosmic Maps, an exhibition that transports visitors to outer space. It showcases a curated selection of print and digital maps from the collection spanning modernity to the present day.

In line with 836M’s 2024 theme “Beyond Frontiers,” which spotlights artists and thinkers whose work transcends physical, cultural, intellectual, or disciplinary boundaries to produce new ideas and experiences, this exhibition is accompanied by a talk series featuring distinguished guest speakers, covering topics ranging from “galactic cannibalism” to interpreting the history of the cosmos through dance.

Among the speakers are Dr. Gregory Mack, a science program officer focusing on astrophysics at The Kavli Foundation, Dr. Bruce McIntosh, the Director of the University of California Observatories, Dr. Natalie Batalha, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, and Dr. Raja GuhaThakurta, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Speaker Schedule

Thursday, June 20, 6:30-8:30 pm - Talk at 836M with Dr. Gregory Mack
Thursday, June 27, 6:30-8:30 pm - Talk at 836M with Dr. Bruce McIntosh & Dr. Natalie Batalha
Thursday, July 11, 6:30-8:30 pm - Talk at 836M with Dr. Raja GuhaThakurta

Image: Planetary System. Eclipse of the Sun. The Moon. The Zodiacal Light. Meteoric Shower by Yaggy, Levi Walter, 1887. Courtesy of The David Rumsey Map Center at the Stanford Libraries.

Dr. Bruce Macintosh is the Director of the University of California Observatories (UCO, the multi-campus research unit that operates and supports UC’s key telescope facilities). Personally, Dr. Macintosh’s research focuses on the study of extrasolar planets, in particular through direct imaging. This involves blocking, suppressing, and subtracting the light of the bright parent star so that a planet hundreds of thousands of times fainter can be seen and studied in detail. Dr. Macintosh co-led the team that imaged the first extrasolar planets and was the Principal Investigator of the Gemini Planet Imager – an advanced adaptive optics planet-finder for the Gemini South telescope, He has been very active in astrophysics science policy, including serving on the Steering Commitee of the 2020 Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Dr. Macintosh believes strongly in making astronomy and physics more inclusive, diverse, and supportive.

Dr. Natalie Batalha has been a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz since 2018. She is an eminent planetary astronomer who served as the scientific lead for NASA’s highly successful Kepler mission, the first mission capable of finding Earth-size planets around other stars, discovering over 2,700 exoplanets and another 2,000 candidates awaiting confirmation. On the Kepler mission, she identified planets that might be able to sustain life and led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system. In 2017, Time magazine named her among the 100 most influential people in the world.

After the Kepler space telescope retired in October 2018, Batalha left NASA to join the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, returning to where she had received her Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1997. She received the UCSC Alumni Achievement Award in 2018 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

Her research focuses on exploring the diversity of planets in our galaxy, investigating questions of planetary habitability, and searching for evidence of life beyond the solar system.

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