Meet the lecturers
You can read more about this year’s 10 Days of Astronomy speakers and their lectures in the following article.
Monday, 07. March 2016. u 17:52 sati
Vladimir Paar is a professor at the Faculty of Science in Zagreb and an academic with the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is the author of more than 500 published scientific and expert works, author and editor of more than 55 books, and has written several physics textbooks. His scientific work consists of more than 100 publications coauthored with 300 foreign scientists from 30 countries. He was born in Zagreb in 1942 to Vladimir and Elvira Paar. He graduated from the Faculty of Science in Zagreb in 1965 with a degree in theoretical physics; received a master’s degree in 1969 and a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics in 1971. He worked as a teaching assistant and scientific associate at the Ruđer Bošković Institute from 1966 to 1975. Shortly after, in 1976, he joined the Physics Department of the Faculty of Science in Zagreb. He was tenured there in 1980. He became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1992.
Davorka Radovčić is a paleoanthropological (the diluvium of Krapina) and anthropological collection custodian at the Croatian Natural History Museum. She graduated from the University of Zagreb (Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Archaeology, 2004) and received her doctoral degree from the University of Michigan (Department of Archaeology, MA 2008, PhD 2011). She specializes in paleoanthropological research. As a researcher, her interests include the origin of the Homo genus, the origin of modern humans, Neanderthals, hunters and gatherers, the Mediterranean prehistoric archaeology, the history of paleoanthropology, and the origin of symbolic behavior.
Lecture summary: The discovery of a new hominin species called Homo naledi was announced in the fall of 2015. Its remains were found in the Dinaledi Chamber in South Africa. Over 1500 specimens of this previously unknown hominin species belonging to 15 different individuals have been excavated from the cave. Professor Radovčić’s lecture will provide us with the context of the Homo naledi discovery, H. naledi’s morphological characteristics, as well as its temporal range dating within the human evolution process.
Ivica Puljak is a professor of physics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Split. He graduated in Zagreb with a degree in electrical engineering and completed his doctorate education in physics in Paris. He has been involved in the CMS collaboration in CERN since 1994, where he has coordinated the efforts of a hundred physicist from all over the world in their search for the Higgs boson. Since 2009 he has also been a member of the MAGIC collaboration, a project which operates two telescopes in order to detect particle showers released by gamma rays, located on the Canary island of La Palma. He has authored more than 400 scientific and expert works and presentations and is actively involved in promoting and popularizing science. His lecture will tell us about the origin of the atoms within us all, as well as about our own future and the future of the universe.
Ante Radonić is the director of Zagreb Technical Museum’s planetarium at the Astronautics department and an astronomy, astronautics and aerospace engineering popularizer. He lectures to students and the public regularly and has given more than 500 public lectures in more than 30 towns and cities across Croatia. He has published over 300 popular science articles in various magazines and has received the honorary award from the Croatian Association of Technical Culture in 2014. He is a regular expert assistant to the makers of Andromeda, The Croatian Radio’s weekly radio program dedicated to the exploration of space.
Lecture summary: This lecture will tell us about the mechanics of leaving Earth and flying into space, the elements needed for successfully entering our planet’s orbit, the ways of sending satellites into the geostationary orbit, as well as how to fly to the Moon. We will mention some of the more recent launch vehicles, sub-orbital spaceflights, as well as edge of space flights for tourism purposes. There will be enough time to answer any questions you may have about astronomy and current events related to the exploration of space.
Nebojša Subanović graduated from the Department of Geophysics at the Faculty of Science in Zagreb with a degree in meteorology. He is the manager and lead forecaster at Geo-Meteo, a Croatian company that provides commercial weather forecasting services. He has been an avid aviator aficionado since childhood. He started flying ultralight aircrafts twenty-seven years ago. He is also a passionate motorist.
Lecture summary: The development of life on planet Earth and its influence on climate change, and the requirements needed for complex life to emerge on a planet such as Earth.
Korado Korlević is one of the leading Croatian astronomers who founded the Višnjan Observatory and initiated numerous educational projects in the area. He was born in Poreč in 1958. He finished high school in Pula and graduated from the Faculty of Pedagogy in Rijeka. He was part of The First International Tunguska Expedition at the site of the Tunguska event in Siberia. Collisions by comets and asteroids motivated him to encourage activities related to exploring small solar system bodies, which resulted in the very first Croatian discoveries of different comets and asteroids. He has discovered more than 1400 asteroids and has participated in the discovery of two comets. He has worked as a manager of educational and scientific activities in Višnjan Observatory since 1993 and is an author of many pedagogical, scientific and popular science works written or published in Croatia as well as abroad. For his work in the field of both astronomy and education he became a recipient of several awards and acknowledgments, member of various international expert organizations and an honorary member of four different associations. The International Astronomical Union has named one of the astronomical objects between Mars and Jupiter after him.
Lecture summary: The remaining n-dimensional display of possible futures allows us to distinguish between several important branches. We are currently witnesses to some of the key technologies of the 21st century, but are we as individuals and as a community prepared for this challenge? Do we possess the knowledge, the passion, the tools and the motivation needed to guide us in the world to come? We live in the most challenging of times. We haven’t seen anything like it in our 150 000 years. And yet we hop in place, aimlessly. Do we have the right to wait for future to happen? Let us learn, think and act; let us find that moment in which we will become the change we wish to see in the world!
Tijana Prodanović is an associate professor at the Department of Physics with the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Novi Sad. She graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade with a degree in astronomy in 2001 and became an astrophysicist. She completed her doctoral studies in astrophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2006. She specializes in particle and nuclear astrophysics, cosmic radiation, nucleosynthesis of light elements and in the astronomy of gamma rays, and has published various astronomical works.
Lecture summary: Superman flies, Spiderman climbs walls, the Hulk is stronger than any man once he goes green; but what does science tell us about their superpowers? Can nature create actual superheroes with supernatural powers, and can science explain them? Is there an X-Man waiting just around the corner or is Batman the most we can hope for?
Mr. Horvatić works as a senior lecturer at the Department of Physics (The Faculty of Science) in Zagreb. His field of research includes elementary-particle physics and hadrons, as well as complex systems and networks, especially stochastic processes and time series analysis. He is the author of 38 scientific papers that have been cited more than a thousand times. He has given over 200 popular lectures and has been on a dozen radio and television programs. He has coauthored elementary student textbooks.
Lecture summary: The very start of 2016 has given us the discovery of gravitational waves. Almost immediately after being reported it was dubbed the discovery of the 21st century. The LIGO collaboration is rumored to receive a Nobel Prize for this accomplishment. What exactly have we measured and what have we learned about Einstein’s general theory of relativity? What does this mean when it comes to our understanding of the universe?
Dijana Dominis Prester is an associate professor at the University of Rijeka. Her scientific research includes gamma-ray astronomy and the search for exoplanets by use of microlensing. She has been an active member of the MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov Telescopes) collaboration since 2009 and PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) collaboration since 2003. She holds a doctoral degree in astrophysics from the Faculty of Science at the University of Potsdam. She is or was the principal investigator involved in the following research projects: "Studying the structure of the Universe using optical and Cherenkov telescopes;" "Participation of the University of Rijeka in international astroparticle experiments;" "Hunt for the time delay in very high energy gamma rays from active galactic nuclei (AGN)."
