Astrophysics Symposium and Celebratory Dinner
at The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

Anthony Brown is associate professor at Leiden Observatory and has been involved in the ESA Gaia mission since 1997. He currently chairs the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, a team of about 430 European astronomers, data engineers, and project specialists who are in charge of turning the raw measurements from the Gaia spacecraft into the Gaia data releases. Anthony is broadly interested in the astronomical research that can be done with the aid of Gaia data, from studies of our own solar system, to exoplanets and binary stars, to understanding the formation history of the Milky Way.

 Anthony grew up on the island of Aruba and moved to Leiden in the Netherlands to pursue studies in astronomy. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1996. He held postdoc positions in Leiden, at the Instituto de Astronomia-UNAM in Ensenada, Mexico, and at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, before returning to Leiden in 2001.

Associate Professor Ása Skúladóttir graduated with a PhD in Astronomy in 2016 from the Kapteyn Institute at the University of Groningen. After a three-year post doc at MPIA in Heidelberg, she moved to the University of Florence, where she has been tenured since 2024. In 2021, the survey 4DWARFS: 4MOST survey of dwarf galaxies and their stellar streams (PI: Skúladóttir) was awarded 500k fibre hours within the 4MOST collaboration, making it the largest Galactic community survey from this competitive call.

Ása Skúladóttir has been awarded an ERC starting grant (2024-2028), for her project TREASURES: Digging into Dwarf Galaxies. Her group at the University of Florence is now heavily focused on the large spectrocopic survey 4MOST which has an expected start in October 2026.

Else Starkenburg started her academic career at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where she completed her PhD research on "Galactic Archaeology in and around the Milky Way" under the supervision of prof. Eline Tolstoy and Kavli-winner prof. Amina Helmi. She subsequently moved to the University of Victoria in Canada as a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Global Scholar and Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) National Fellow. In 2014, she moved to the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany as Karl Schwarzschild Fellow, where she started her own research group with an Emmy Noether Prize Fellowship.

She now is back at the University of Groningen as an associate professor. Together with her (international) collaborators and her group in Groningen, funded through NWO-VIDI and ERC Consolidator grants, she works towards a better understanding of the very early history of the Milky Way galaxy.

Oscar Agertz is an Associate Professor at the Division of Astrophysics, Department of Physics at Lund University, Sweden, and leader of the Lund Galaxy Formation group. His research spans a range of topics, including the formation and evolution of galaxies in a cosmological context, star formation and feedback processes in the interstellar medium, computational astrophysics, and dark matter.

He received his PhD in 2010 at the University of Zürich and was subsequently awarded a Kavli Fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. In 2013 he became an Assistant Professor in astrophysics group at the University of Surrey. After receiving a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship in 2016, he established a research group at Lund University.