ICTP is pleased to announce that the forthcoming ICTP Colloquium by Professor Timothy Beers on "the Astrophysics Origin of the Elements in the Periodic Table" will take place on Wednesday 4 September 2019 at 16:30 hrs, in the Budinich Lecture Hall, Leonardo Building, ICTP.

Biosketch: Timothy Beers is the Grace-Rupley Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, and a co-PI in the Physics Frontier Center JINA-CEE (Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics – Center for the Evolution of the Elements), funded by the US National Science Foundation. He is a former director of the US Kitt Peak National Observatory, and spent 25 years working as a Professor in Physics & Astronomy at Michigan State University. Beers is interested in the origin and evolution of the elements in the Universe, and the assembly of large spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way, a field now referred to as Galactic Archaeology. For decades, Professor Beers has designed and executed large-scale surveys of stars in the Milky Way, efficiently sifting through literally millions of individual stars in order to find those objects that have recorded the chemical history of the Universe in their atmospheres. His work has led to the identification of a subset of the so-called carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars that exhibit a characteristic light-element signature (enhanced C, N, O, Na, Si, Mg), now recognized to be due to nucleosynthesis processes associated with the very first stars born in the Universe. Presently he is conducting a survey for so-called r-process-enhanced stars, which are metal-poor stars that exhibit over-abundances of elements produced by the rapid neutron-capture process, and place strong constraints on the origin of over half of the elements beyond iron in the Periodic Table.