Profile

Rudy Wijnands is Professor at the University of Amsterdam.  After concluding his PhD research in 1999 at the same university, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Space Research of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA) and in the astronomy group of the University of St. Andrews (Scotland, UK). He rejoined the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy in 2004. In 2006, he received the Bruno Rossi prize, the most prestigious award of the High-Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society. He is an ERC Starter Grant and NWO-TOP1 Laureate. 

Research and Teaching

Rudy studies the extreme physics that occur in and around neutron stars and black holes. He performs those studies by looking how those extreme objects react to the accretion of matter. His long-term goals are to understand the accretion processes involved and the behavior of matter at extreme densities as seen in neutron stars. In his research, he uses data obtained using the largest telescopes in space as well as on Earth. He teaches mostly in the BSc Physics & Astronomy program, and in particular observational courses using the Anton Pannekoek Observatory, associated with the Anton Pannekoek Institute. He is the care taker of this observatory. 

Keywords

Neutron stars, dense matter, accretion, X-ray pulsars.