Kerstin - who is that?
For those who clicked this page....do you really want to know
who I am?
This is your way back ....
So well:
Once upon a time, it was the 11th of September in the year 1971,
I was born in a small town, called
Lorsch
right in the middle of Germany.
It's a beautiful little old town, defently worth a visit,
will always be my beloved home town.
As all little girls, I visited the kindergarten there, went to elementary
school and was sent to an all-girls school, the
Liebfrauenschule Bensheim
to be raised as a friendly well behaved MISS.
Actually that never happened, for one special experience I made when
I was ten. My parents took me to Florida where
we went to Cape Canaveral. I saw the space shuttle - I loved it.
Since that day nothing was more precious to me than space.
I wanted to dedicate my life to space! So I took all that physics stuff
(what kept me from becoming a well behaved girl....) and started to study
physics and astronomy at the
University of Heidelberg .
In 1993 I was offered an 4 month trainee-ship at the European Space
Agency( ESA) and worked at the European Space Operation Center ( ESOC) in
Darmstadt, Germany.
There I participated in the
ROSETTA
program, an unmanned spacecraft that will explore a comet and was
launched March 2, 2004 at 07:17 UTC.
Also in 1993 found the other love of my life: Dominik.
We got married in September 1997, and are now a two
astronomer family ..... see
Dominik Bomans.
I got my Diploma in physics 1996 for the University of Heidelberg working
at the Institut für Theoretische
Astrophysik( ITA) The Diploma
thesis already dealt with massive stars, titled: The dynamics
of circumstellar bubbles: Eta Carinae,
HR Carinae, Sk-69 279 and Sk-69 271
(
(German, pdf-file) )
This topic was followed in my Ph.D. studies at the same institute
with the major subject being nebulae
around massive stars, Wolf-Rayet stars, Luminous Blue Variables.
Parallel to this I was a
visiting gradute student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My thesis advisor was
Wolfgang J. Duschl
and I graduated from Heidelberg in 1999 with my dissertation beeing about:
The Morphology and Kinematics of Nebulae around Luminous Blue Variables
(
(German, pdf-file, 7 Mbyte)
I spend another year as posdoc at the ITA to work on my first own HST data.
In 2001 I recieved a Fedor-Lynen fellowship of the
Alexander von Humboldt foundation and
moved to the Astronomy Department of the University of Minnesota
(USA) As a postdoc, I was working with
Kris Davidson and Roberta Humphreys on Eta Carinae and other LBVs.
I returned to Germany
in Feburary of 2002 to the Max-Planck-Institut für
Radioastronomie and worked in Prof. Gerd Weigelts Group,
to especially learn more about Interferometric Methods in Astronomy.
Now, since march 2003, I am at the Astronomical Institut at
the Ruhr-University in Bochum.
In summer 2004 I have been awarded a Lise Meitner fellowship from the state
of North-Rhine Westphalia to do my 'Habilitation'.
More news as more happens in my life....