Joanne Dawson

Affiliate

Macquarie University

Biography

Dr Jo Dawson (BSc 1st class hons UCL, PhD Nagoya University) holds a joint position as a Senior Lecturer in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Macquarie University and a Research Scientist at CSIRO Space & Astronomy (S&A). She was previously an ARC DECRA Fellow at Macquarie, a Bolton Fellow at CASS, and an ARC Super Science Fellow at the University of Tasmania. She has been working at Macquarie since 2014. Dr Dawson's core interests are radio astronomical studies of the interstellar medium (ISM). Her research focuses on the evolution of the ISM in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, and in particular on the mechanisms by which the atomic medium is processed into molecular clouds. A key highlight of her work has been providing quantitative evidence of molecular cloud formation in giant "supershells" formed by multiple stellar winds and supernovae. In recent years her attention has turned to the so-called "Dark ISM" - material bridging the gap between the diffuse/atomic and dense/molecular regimes, and which is invisible to most standard radio astronomical tracers. She leads the large radio astronomical survey project SPLASH (the Southern Parkes Large-Area Survey in Hydroxyl), a deep survey of OH molecules in the Southern Galactic Plane which aims to characterise this hidden gas in the Milky Way, and co-leads the Australia Telescope Square Kilometer Array GASKAP survey. She is also investigating the relationships between radio spectral line tracers of the gaseous ISM, and infra-red and optical emission/absorption from interstellar dust.