Speaker profile
Dr Conor Byrne
Available for booking
Summary
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Warwick, simulating the evolution of stars, binary stars and the populations of stars seen in galaxies near and far.
Full biography
Conor Byrne is a postdoctoral researcher in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group at the University of Warwick, where he works with Elizabeth Stanway. He also plays an active role in public engagement, co-leading the group’s outreach programme and helping run events with a mobile planetarium. Conor is passionate about sharing astronomy with a wider audience and enjoys communicating complex ideas in accessible and engaging ways. He completed his PhD jointly at Trinity College Dublin and the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium.
In his current research, Conor studies how the chemical makeup of stars and galaxies affects what we can learn from astronomical observations, especially with new data from the James Webb Space Telescope. By using advanced computer models of stellar populations, he explores how different assumptions influence our understanding of distant galaxies and the stars within them.
For his PhD, Conor focused on the evolution of rare, hot, low-mass stars and how interactions between stars in binary systems shape their development. His work has contributed to a better understanding of how stars evolve and exchange material, and his research has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
