Dr. Annalisa Bracco is a professor at Georgia Tech with extensive background in computational fluid dynamics and physical oceanography. Her research interests include coastal ocean circulation, with focus on meso- and submesoscale processes, ocean predictability and inverse dynamics, impacts of physical forcing on ecosystems, and climate model validation. Her group has been involved in field collections during the Deepwater Horizon spill (July/Aug. 2010) and was back in the Gulf in the summer of 2011.

Tamara Bogdanović is a theoretical astrophysicist whose research interests include the ins and outs of some of the most massive black holes in the universe known as supermassive black holes. She investigates the physical processes that arise in accretion flows around supermassive black holes and uses them as luminous tracers of these otherwise dark objects. Some of the scenarios she and her colleagues study include the accretion of gas by the single and binary supermassive black holes as well as the accretion of stars that happen to be disrupted by the black hole tides in galactic nuclei. Tamara’s goal as a theorist is to predict the signatures of these interactions which can be searched for in observations, as well as to provide interpretation for some of the puzzling astrophysical events seen on the sky.