Recent News

GRAD-MAP summer project

I was recently featured, together with my student, in the CMNS news article GRAD‑MAP Students, Mentors ‘Learn From Each Other’, which highlights the nine-week collaborative research projects between UMD researchers and Summer Scholars in physics and astronomy. It was an honor to be part of a program.

Check it out at: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/grad-map-students-mentors-learn-each-other

Ridmi Madarasinghe and Ankita Bera at the GRAD-MAP research symposium on August 8, 2025. Image credit: Mark Sherwood.

CFC 2025 conference in Austin, Texas

Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin’s new Cosmic Frontier Center, this conference brought together observers and theorists to discuss and share results on the first 500 million years after the Big Bang, focusing on the origins of the earliest stars, galaxies, and black holes in light of groundbreaking JWST discoveries.

My talk is available here: https://www.as.utexas.edu/~stevenf/cfc2025/videos/83_Ankita%20Bera.mov

To access all the presentations, visit: https://www.as.utexas.edu/~stevenf/cfc2025/