Lauren Rhodes

Meet...Lauren Rhodes

Astronomy and astrophysics
Astrophysics

We work among extraordinary people doing extraordinary things; get to know some of them by reading these quick-fire interviews.

Name: Lauren Rhodes
Job title: Postdoctoral Research Associate, High Energy Astrophysics

What are you currently working on?
At the moment, I am working on understanding rapid radio/sub-mm flaring that has been observed in a number of X-ray binaries (binaries that contain a black hole/ neutron star and a low mass star). During my PhD I studied the radio emission from extragalactic transients and am now applying the models and that understanding to radio transients within our own galaxies.

Describe a typical day
Currrently, every day is quite different but usually I start by checking the arxiv (a website that has a list of all the newly published papers in a given field) accompanied with a coffee. Then I check to see if I have any new observations that have been taken with one of the telescopes that we use a lot: either the AMI-LA telescope in Cambridge, UK or MeerKAT in South Africa. If there are new observations I ‘reduce’ the data meaning I calibrate it and make an image. Depending on whether I do or don’t detect the targets of the observations, I work out the best observing strategy for a given type of object.

I usually have a meeting with colleagues or there is a seminar to attend at some point the day. I try to make sure I find time to go to seminars that aren’t directly relevant to my own work because I believe that it is important to understand what other research is currently happening in our department and it’s not just my own research I find interesting... there is a lot of other fascinating science being done!

In the afternoon I try to get on with one of my current major projects. This usually involves understanding the observations of a particular object and applying models to extract physics on that object or writing code to create models. The data collected on any given object will always be different and so there’s no set recipe to go from data to physics.

My after-work time is different every day, some days I go to the gym, or go running or rock climbing, or I relax at home with my housemates. There is also often an opportunity to go for a drink too – our department is very social and there’s always people doing something in the evening.

If you had an entire day at your disposal (not at work), what would be your ideal way to spend it?
I would start with a lie in, grab a coffee and a croissant in one of Oxford’s amazing independent cafes on the way to Ashmolean, Oxford’s version of the British Museum. Afterwards, I would head to Brookes climbing gym and finish up the day in a pub with my friends.

What is your favourite place in Oxford?
Jericho Coffee Traders on the High Street – amazing coffee, lovely baristas, great people watching.

What discovery would you like to see in your lifetime?
In my lifetime, I would like to see a supernova occur in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The last one occurred in 1604 (Kepler’s Supernova). Given that we expect at least one supernova in a galaxy like our own every 100 years (if not more often) we are very much overdue.