Professor Peter Adey, Royal Holloway, University of London Trevelyan College January – March 2014
Peter Adey is Professor in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works at the intersections of space, security and mobility and within the blurring boundaries between Cultural and Political Geography. He has been exploring these themes to develop three closely related research agendas at the airport/ border; the vertical territorial and material spaces of air; and the political and technological spaces of emergency and evacuation. Through these agendas he has helped to develop a ‘new mobilities’ turn or paradigm within the arts and social sciences which has seen his book Mobility become one of the standard texts in many courses on mobilities and communications, and Aerial Life one of the first monographs to take the aerial world to task about its geopolitical discourses, and biopolitical and governmental formations of power. In 2011 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for outstanding scholars who have made a substantial contribution to their particular field of study.
In 2012 Professor Adey joined Royal Holloway to establish a Geopolitics and Security MSc. He is Chair of the Social and Cultural Geography research group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, has published widely and is a member of the international advisory boards of the journals Mobilities; Resilience; and Geography Compass. He is the author of Mobility (2009); Aerial Life: spaces, mobilities, affects (2010); Air (forthcoming 2013); and co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Mobilities (2013); From Above: verticality, war and violence (2013).
While at the IAS, Professor Adey will develop his interest in the aerial and wider cultural and political registers of security to explore examples of the light-ening levitating body, from ecstatic catholic saints, tightrope walkers and resuscitated bodies, to contemporary performance artists. He will explore how the ascending subject might be investigated and theorised in relation to contemporary questions within political theology and social and cultural theory.
Dr Ulisses Barres de Almeida, Brazilian Center for Research in Physics University College January – March 2014
Dr Ulisses Barres is an Astrophysicist at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics (CBPF/MCTI) specialising in High- Energy Astrophysics and Astroparticle Physics. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree (Physics) and Masters’ degree (Astronomy) from the University of São Paulo and became involved with research in Gamma-ray Astronomy whist completing his doctorate at Durham University where he worked on the H.E.S.S. Experiment, the leading observatory for gamma-ray astronomy.
In the past five years his research has concentrated on the study of extragalactic objects, and in particular active galactic nuclei (AGN), extragalactic relativistic jets and radio galaxies, fields in which he has published over a dozen collaborative research papers. He is currently working on tests of Lorentz invariance, a fundamental symmetry of nature at the basis of modern physics and whose validity at extreme energies can be tested using the observation of gamma-rays emitted by distant galaxies.
In 2010 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPI) in Munich, and has worked on the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) project, an international consortium of over 800 scientists from 28 countries to build the next generation of ground-based gamma-ray telescopes. Now based in Rio de Janeiro, Dr Barres leads the Brazilian participation on the planning and construction of the CTA. Whilst at the MPI he also established a joint programme with the MAGIC collaboration for the study of the relativistic jets of AGNs in polarised light and gamma-rays, and developed a new analysis technique termed ‘Polarimetric Tomography.’
While at the IAS Dr Barres will be using data from the gamma- ray observatories H.E.S.S., MAGIC and Fermi/LAT to look for signatures of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) in what aims to be the most complete statistical study to date on the topic, testing the validity of this fundamental principle of physics at and beyond the Planck scale. He will also collaborate with colleagues from the Department of Physics on their activities associated to AGN studies.
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