Astronomy Public Engagement Leader – Dr Sadie Jones
Astronomy Public Engagement Leader: Sadie’s current role involves co-ordination and management of all the astronomy outreach and public engagement activities from the Physics and Astronomy department. A large part of this involves managing a team of undergraduate students, PhD students and Post Docs who work with the astrodome and deliver research focused planetarium shows aka #OurGreatestTeam. Sadie and her team also run the ‘Learning about the Aurora’ repeat intervention program in local widening participation (WP) schools which includes the citizen science project, The Aurora Zoo and the Connect Physics workshops. For WP primary schools her team deliver the award winning cross-discipline SotonAstroArt and Black hole poetry workshops. Sadie also manages the Space Zone at the Southampton Science and Engineering Festival (SOTSEF) every year and acts as a media correspondent on all things space related.
Teaching: Sadie has taught for over 6 years on the two Tenerife field trip modules, PHYS2011: Design and Observation in Astronomy and PHYS2030: European Dimension in Space and from January 2024 she will be the module lead on optional module UOSM2046: Discovering Our Universe.
PhD research: Her work mainly involved work on an individual Active Galactic Nucleui called NGC 4051, using data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, USA. She was looking for a correlation between the Radio and X-ray regimes at the core of this source, where the black hole is.
A paper about on her work was accepted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and an online copy can be found here at the online arXix, astro-ph.
Masters: MPhys in Astrophysics at Cardiff University. During her undergraduate studies she first discovered her love for all things outreach. This love was inspired primarily by working with the Faulkes Telescope team for her BSc and Masters projects and then from working at camps in America during the summers and doing weekend work in the planetarium at the local science discovery centre, Techniquest.
Publications:
| Jones,S. (2017). Astronomy in the Airport: Supernova science in the departure lounge. Accepted to the peer reviewed Communicating Astronomy with Public Journal. |
Jones, S., McHardy, I., & Maccarone, T. (2016). A comprehensive long term study of the radio and X-ray Variability of NGC 4051 Paper II. Accepted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09228
Jones, S. et al. (2010). Radio and X-ray variability in Seyfert galaxy NGC 4051. Accepted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6633
| Jones, S. John, P. (2021). Four years of the #SotonAstroArt project. Accepted to the proceedings of Communicating Astronomy with Public. |
Jones, S. (2021). Black Hole Poetry website. https://generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk/bhpoetry/
Jones, S. (2017). #SotonAstroArt website. https://sotonastroart.wordpress.com/
For further information on Sadie’s past outreach/public engagement please see the Soton Astrodome Blog.
For regular updates on the Soton Astrodome and general Astronomy Outreach activities please follow @SotonAstrodome on Twitter which is manily tweeted by Dr Jones, but occasionally by the rest of #OurGreatestTeam (you can learn more about the team by reading their descriptions further down on this page).
If you have time please also ‘Like’ us on Facebook! Our Facebook page is also a great place to start Astronomy discussions if you have any questions.