Sadie started work at the University of Southampton as the Outreach Leader in Astronomy in June 2011. Ths role involves co-ordination and management of all the astronomy outreach and public engagement activities from the Physics and Astronomy department. A large part of this role involves managing a team of undergraduate and PhD students who work with the astrodome aka #OurGreatestTeam. Sadie also organises Stargazing live events on campus, the SETI Cipher Challenge in July, Astrodome events in the local community and acts as a media correspondent on all things space related.
Sadie graduated with a PhD in Radio Astronomy from the University of Southampton in July 2012. Her research was an investigation of the radio emission from an active supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy NGC 4051. She used this data to determine if galaxy had a jet. Sadie has a talk on her Black Hole research which is suitable for year 8 and Up!
Before coming to Southampton to do her PhD Sadie completed an MPhys in Astrophysics at Cardiff University. During her undergraduate studies she first discovered her love for all things outreach. This love was inspired primarily by working with the Faulkes Telescope team for her BSc and Masters projects and then from working at camps in America during the summers and doing weekend work in the planetarium at the local science discovery centre, Techniquest.
In 2019 Sadie's role changed slightly to become the 'Astronomy Public Engagament Leader \& SEPnet Outreach Officer'. She will now focus more on a strategic public engagement and outreach program which will see the University working with less schools but having more repeat visits with that school in a year and therefore, having more impact on the young people.
For further information on Sadie's outreach/public engagement please see the Soton Astrodome Blog.
For regular updates on the Soton Astrodome and general Astronomy Outreach activites please follow @SotonAstrodome on Twitter which is manily tweeted by Dr Jones, but occasionaly by the rest of #OurGreatestTeam (you can learn more about the team by reading their descriptions on this page).
If you have time please also 'Like' us on Facebook! Our Facebook page is also a great place to start Astronomy discussions if you have any questions.
Sadie's PhD thesis mainly involved work on an individual Active Galactic Nucleui called NGC 4051, using data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, USA. She was looking for a correlation between the Radio and X-ray regimes at the core of this source, where the black hole is.
A paper about on her work was accepted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and an online copy can be found here at the online arXix, astro-ph.
