Santa Cruz FLASH Seminar
06 Nov 2015I’m in Santa Cruz, CA at UCSC giving the Friday Lunch Time Astrophysics Seminar on Single and Double Degenerate Pathways towards Accretion-Induced Collapse.
I’m in Santa Cruz, CA at UCSC giving the Friday Lunch Time Astrophysics Seminar on Single and Double Degenerate Pathways towards Accretion-Induced Collapse.
I’m in Cambridge, MA at Harvard giving a Small Scale Phenomena Seminar on The Long-Term Outcomes of Double White Dwarf Mergers.
I’m in New York, NY at Columbia giving an Astronomy Seminar on The Long-Term Outcomes of Double White Dwarf Mergers.
The following statement represents the consensus reached by the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department graduate student community as of October 12th, 2015:
The determination by UC Berkeley’s Title IX Office that Astronomy Professor Geoff Marcy violated the University’s sexual harassment policies is deeply troubling. We are appalled by Geoff Marcy’s actions, and by the extended length of time his behavior continued without repercussions. Our concern is compounded by the University’s decision to forego immediate disciplinary action, and by the secrecy surrounding the findings: most members of the Department learned about the report—months after it was issued—from an article on BuzzFeed.
First, we offer our support to the women who have experienced sexual harassment from Geoff Marcy, and we pledge to work to make the Department safe and supportive for everyone, and to advocate for a zero-tolerance sexual harassment policy.
This incident, and its handling by the relevant authorities, are symptoms of problematic attitudes ingrained in UC Berkeley as a whole, and the Astronomy Department in particular. The University’s failure to impose meaningful consequences on Geoff Marcy—offering instead vague threats of future sanctions should the behavior continue—suggests that Berkeley’s administration values prestige and grant money over the well-being of the young scientists it is charged with training. That at least some members of the Department were aware of Geoff Marcy’s penchant for inappropriate behavior and remarks—if not the full extent of his transgressions—for a decade leading up to the Title IX proceedings indicates that Department leadership has, historically, suffered similarly misaligned priorities.
The response issued by Astronomy Chair Professor Gibor Basri casts doubt on whether current Department leadership can adequately address this issue. Professor Basri’s email—which failed to extend support to victims of sexual harassment and instead directed students and postdocs to offer Geoff Marcy their sympathy—was inappropriate and offensive. We ask that Professor Basri relinquish leadership of this case to a faculty member who will not be biased by a long-standing personal and professional relationship with Geoff Marcy.
It is especially disappointing to watch these events unfold only months after the conclusion of a climate survey in our Department, which highlighted the need for substantive changes to the Department’s sexual harassment policies. Though several recommendations were drawn from the survey findings, none—as far as we are aware—have been implemented. It is time for the Astronomy Department to reaffirm its dedication to creating and maintaining an environment free from sexual harassment by immediately:
Whether and under what circumstances Geoff Marcy should continue his relationship with the University of California is complicated, and the opinions of the graduate student community on this matter vary. We ask the Department to coordinate with the University to impose proportionate sanctions, while remaining sensitive to the academic needs of the graduate students in Geoff Marcy’s research group.
Preventing sexual harassment requires swiftly responding to incidents, and working proactively to address the systemic problems that allow harassment to happen. We are therefore coordinating with postdocs and faculty in Astronomy to craft a broad series of recommendations, which we encourage the Department to adopt. These recommendations include:
We further request faculty support building interdepartmental alliances to revise the University policies and practices that led to our current crisis. While we are disturbed by the actions of some Department administrators, we recognize that several Astronomy professors were instrumental in initiating Title IX proceedings. These faculty members have communicated to us their intent to advocate for a just resolution to this incident, and to support the graduate student community. We thank those professors who have reached out, while acknowledging that many other faculty members likely share their intentions.
We recognize that sexual harassment is pervasive in Astronomy and throughout academia; ours is not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. We hope that by taking the steps outlined above, UC Berkeley can become a leader in combating this issue, rather than an abettor of harassment.
I contributed to and approve of this message.
Josiah Schwab
The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, Volume 220, Issue 1, article id. 15, 44 pp.
Bill Paxton, Pablo Marchant, Josiah Schwab, Evan B. Bauer, Lars Bildsten, Matteo Cantiello, Luc Dessart, R. Farmer, H. Hu, N. Langer, R.H.D. Townsend, Dean M. Townsley, F.X. Timmes
We substantially update the capabilities of the open-source software instrument Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). MESA can now simultaneously evolve an interacting pair of differentially rotating stars undergoing transfer and loss of mass and angular momentum, greatly enhancing the prior ability to model binary evolution. New MESA capabilities in fully coupled calculation of nuclear networks with hundreds of isotopes now allow MESA to accurately simulate advanced burning stages needed to construct supernova progenitor models. Implicit hydrodynamics with shocks can now be treated with MESA, enabling modeling of the entire massive star lifecycle, from pre-main sequence evolution to the onset of core collapse and nucleosynthesis from the resulting explosion. Coupling of the GYRE non-adiabatic pulsation instrument with MESA allows for new explorations of the instability strips for massive stars while also accelerating the astrophysical use of asteroseismology data. We improve treatment of mass accretion, giving more accurate and robust near-surface profiles. A new MESA capability to calculate weak reaction rates "on-the-fly" from input nuclear data allows better simulation of accretion induced collapse of massive white dwarfs and the fate of some massive stars. We discuss the ongoing challenge of chemical diffusion in the strongly coupled plasma regime, and exhibit improvements in MESA that now allow for the simulation of radiative levitation of heavy elements in hot stars. We close by noting that the MESA software infrastructure provides bit-for-bit consistency for all results across all the supported platforms, a profound enabling capability for accelerating MESA's development.