Charlotte Welker
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Biography
As a kid I hesitated for a while between several career plans. I wasn't sure whether I'd become an astrophysicist, an astronaut or a detective. It seems life selected the safest option, to the relief of my family! My Astro research journey began in 2011 at UC Berkeley, during a short master internship, where I was introduced to dark matter density field reconstruction from convergence maps by Alexie Leauthaud. But it is really in France, my home country, at Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, that I could finally merge my childish fascination for vortical flows with astrophysical investigations, and then my passion really took off. I completed my PhD with Christophe Pichon, Yohan Dubois and Julien Devriendt, who trained me in galaxy evolution from a theoretical and numerical perspective. In particular, I used large cosmological simulations to study how galaxies evolve their morphology and spin through mergers and gas accretion, under the influence of cosmic filaments. I then proceeded to tour the world on a postdoc spree, with successive fellowships at ICRAR in Australia, McMaster University in Canada and Johns Hopkins University in the United States. Aside from my primary goal of meeting face-to-face with kangaroos, moose and bears, I discovered fantastic communities of observers and theorists living in symbiosis under the night sky. They introduced me to the power and beauty of integral-field spectroscopy and radio-astronomy. There, I discovered the exhilarating feeling of preparing for upcoming missions on the new instruments that set the heartbeat of global astronomy, from Hector to the SKA to JWST, and waiting eagerly for these new windows onto the Universe to open! On the way, I also realized how much I enjoy mentoring students on research projects. In my mind, Astronomy stands out as the playground of science. I love this idea and the freedom that comes with it! But it also makes for a field of low human stakes. Student mentorship really brings to it to the next level by giving me the extra meaning and sense of purpose that I need to keep tackling complex problems and strive for new discoveries. In pursuit of this calling, I finally moved to New York in 2022 and joined the faculty at CUNY to start my own research group, GothamWeb.