08:01:00 Well good morning everyone.
08:01:03 I want to go ahead and just get started so I'm Lars Bildsten the director at the KITP and I welcome all of you into this unusual format.
08:01:13 We look forward to going back to in person. For the next year as teachers conference But we will be doing a survey at the end as well to.
08:01:23 We always do a survey, but this time we're going to ask a question in the survey as to whether or not as a replacement for in person, but if we chose to add one of these as an online event sometime different time of year, whether that would be of interest
08:01:36 of course right now everybody's had enough of zoom.
08:01:39 But we are thinking through at the institute how to take advantage of everything we've learned in the last year, so we will be doing a survey in that regards at the end but let me start by thanking and acknowledging Maggie sheriff's Maggie is our KITP staff
08:01:55 member extraordinaire who's been pulling all this together.
08:01:58 So Maggie if you're out there. I can't see everybody on the screen Oh Maggie is waving everyone. You want to say a few words Maggie.
08:02:07 No, I want to hear about astrophysics. Awesome. okay.
08:02:13 So real quick, we will be doing some breakouts the first breakout you see on your schedule at nine o'clock will be two kind of random breakouts to do our best at emulating what many of you enjoy doing when we're all together which is talking to each other,
08:02:27 finding out what's going on across the country.
08:02:30 So those would be the two breakouts that are starting at nine o'clock just be random but again it's a little bit of what we would do on that night before the event many of you been here before we have a social mixer.
08:02:42 So hopefully that will give you an opportunity to meet some of your colleagues who are out there. And then we have breakouts at noon which are much more about getting interact more interactions with scientists we have kITP postdocs and scientists around
08:02:57 the world who will be joining us so it every quote unquote table there'll be a scientist there with you, and that will be playing out at noon, these are all California times.
08:03:08 So I want to just acknowledge as well Alina, and Craig, two of our KITP staff who are been managing all of our zoom events and recording everything for the last year and a bit.
08:03:21 So KITP has been running remote we have been keeping pretty much all of our activities in the year 2020, we ended up, engaging about 2000 scientists across the world with our different events so we maintain our convening as best we can, given what we're
08:03:37 dealing with, and the other big event this year was we had a 10,000 gallon flood in Kohn Hall.
08:03:45 So, not in the room you're accustomed to but in another room so thankfully that repair work is done, and we also took the opportunity for last year to shine the place up.
08:03:55 So next time you come.
08:03:57 It will look a little bit shiny or that it is now nothing like an empty building to give you the opportunity to do construction that you can never do.
08:04:03 So with no further ado I want to hand this over to Mateo Cantiello, Mateo had been a postdoc here at the KITP and is now a research scientist, at Flatiron Institute.
08:04:14 And I want to thank Mateo and all the speakers for all the work they've been doing to pull this together and somebody over to you.
08:04:20 Anything thanks so much tracks. Yeah, so welcome everyone. I taught, I will just welcome you all, and share a couple of slides, just to get the ball rolling before we get our scientists.
08:04:37 I hope you can see my slide.
08:04:40 Perfect. So, welcome to this year KITP teachers conference mentioned, this is a remote only conference, and we hope to come back to, in person next year.
08:04:53 The plan for today we're going to have very interesting talks from four leaders in the field of stealth physics with particular focus on the study of white dwarfs, I will have Mike Montgomery from UT Austin, JJ Hermes from Boston University, Barbara Castanheira Endl,
08:05:11 from Baylor University and Ken Shen from UC Berkeley.
08:05:16 So just a couple of just a little bit of housekeeping for the remote talks so during the talk, I asked you to please keep your mic mute.
08:05:27 This is useful so that we don't you know accumulate background noise and it's going to help everyone to hear loud and clear what scientists have to say.
08:05:47 But I welcome you to unmute you if you have a question or need clarification.
08:05:50 Alternatively you can raise your hand. I'll keep an eye on hands on the zoom feature and quote yes your question. When I do so unmute yourself. And, and then after you ask you a question, be sure to lower your hand and you, again,
08:06:08 as Lars mentioned we're going to have some breakout rooms, is that going to be interesting to mingle among yourself and with a scientist, so we'll have a few sessions for this will give you more details before the breakout room starts.
08:06:24 But I wanted to just like you know mentioned something that I don't think I, you know, I need to mention to this crowd you know you guys are probably by now, the, the expert on this on using zoom and using zoom the in the most useful way to be inclusive
08:06:41 and allow people to feel free to speak, do not dominate conversation and be nice to each other. I just wanted to remind it, so please use the same metric when you're in the breakout session so that you know we can make this as as profitable for everyone
08:06:56 as possible.
08:06:58 Finally, before we get started, I just wanted to thank all our scientists that decided to, you know, spend some time to prepare this lectures and stocks and be here today.
08:07:12 Mike Montgomery from University of Texas, Austin, Barbara Castanheira Endl from Baylor University, JJ Hermes from Boston University and Ken Shen from UC Berkeley, and I'll just say that these are like colleagues of mine, and friends of mine,
08:07:26 but also there are world leaders in the field of study physics, these are really the people who are doing the science and pushing the edge of what we know about what worse.
08:07:36 When I you know I start to fill up still physically to know something about why these are the people are usually go to.
08:07:44 So I will, I hope this is going to be a useful conversation, and I'm sure we all learn a lot today and I'm very excited about hearing the talks. So with no further us, and unless we have any questions about the plan today.
08:08:02 I'll give maybe 20 seconds for people to unmute and ask questions they have.
08:08:10 But if not, we'll slowly.
08:08:14 Get ready and have Mike.
08:08:18 Get Started. Mike, do you want to start sharing your presentation.