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Laura Nicole Driessen

(she/her)

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Postdoctoral researcher in radio astronomy, University of Sydney

I'm a radio astronomer who works with the biggest telescopes in Australia to search for radio light from stars and things that change in the radio sky.

I completed my BSc (Majoring in Astronomy & Astrophysics and Applied Maths and minoring in Physics) at Monash University in 2014, my MSc in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and my PhD in radio astronomy at the University of Manchester in the UK. My master's thesis was titled "LOFAR imaging of the Galactic Plane: pulsar wind nebula G541.+0.3 and its environment" and was awarded the 2017 prize for the best astronomy master's thesis in the Netherlands. My PhD thesis was titled "Radio transients with MeerKAT". I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the CSIRO from September 2021 to January 2023, when I started as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney.

My dog Astro is a whippet who’s a bit closer to a greyhound than a whippet in size. If you’d like to use him as a unit of measure, he’s 94cm long and weighs 18kg.

Experience

  • 2023–present
    Postdoctoral research fellow, The University of Sydney
  • 2021–2023
    Postdoctoral research fellow, CSIRO

Education

  • 2021 
    The University of Manchester, PhD in radio astronomy
  • 2017 
    The University of Amsterdam, Master's of Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • 2014 
    The University of Monash, Bachelor of Science (Science Scholars program)

Publications

  • 2023
    FRB 20210405I: the first Fast Radio Burst sub-arcsecond localised with MeerKAT, ArXiv
  • 2022
    The detection of radio emission from known X-ray flaring star EXO 040830-7134.7, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
  • 2022
    21 new long-term variables in the GX 339-4 field: two years of MeerKAT monitoring, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
  • 2020
    MKT J170456.2-482100: the first transient discovered by MeerKAT, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
  • 2019
    Scattering features and variability of the Crab pulsar, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
  • 2018
    Investigating Galactic Supernova Remnant Candidates Using LOFAR, Astrophysical Journal

Honours

De Zeeuw-Van Dishoeck Award for Astronomy