The summer conference season peaked during the month of July with the 2025 National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) being held at Durham University from 7-11th July. This year’s conference saw several LIV.INNO personnel attending with various forms of contributions. The number of registered participants for this NAM was almost 1000, one of the largest ever in the history of this conference series.
The annual week-long NAM conference is regarded as one of the major conference events for astronomers across the British Isles. It has a long history with the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the founder and the main organising body of this series since 1948. Every NAM includes a variety of academic events including big plenary lectures about a variety of topics in astronomy, alongside a plethora of parallel sessions that are more specialised. Not only that, there are also plenty of community sessions, public lectures and workshops aimed at a more general audience who can also attend.
Official conference photo for the National Astronomy Meeting 2025 – Durham University
Khang Minh Nguyen, current second-year LIV.INNO student, presented a poster on ‘A SOFIA-HAWC+ Magnetic Fields Investigation of W51’. His poster looks at the magnetic field properties of the massive star-forming molecular cloud called W51, using dust polarisation data obtained from the SOFIA-HAWC+ polarimeter, to investigate how the magnetic fields affect how young stars are supported and suppressed from forming in a region of rich & dense molecular material.
Final-year LIV.INNO student, Jonah Conley, was the most active with both a talk and poster to show at the conference. His talk for the ‘A multi-scale and multi-tracer view of the cosmic web’ session comprised an up-to-date summary of his ongoing project into studying the 'patchy screening' effect (a potential new probe of the cosmic microwave background) using the FLAMINGO cosmological simulations.
Jonah’s poster gave an overall summary of the emulator he is developing from the upcoming suite of simulations as a sister project to FLAMINGO (tentatively called BAHAMAS-XL). The emulator will look at supporting the theoretical analysis of cosmological simulations by using machine-learning methods to predict summary statistics, using only a set of simulation input values to probe a wide parameter space.
Fellow second-year LIV.INNO student, Sakirçan Beyazit, also presented a talk in a session called ‘Illuminating the Faintest Galaxies: Dwarf Galaxies as Probes of Dark Matter, Feedback, and the First Stars’. His research talk was on the populations of low-mass dwarf galaxies, specifically on how to better describe the star-forming population via analyses of different distribution functions.
First-year LIV.INNO student Rosie Bartlett also made her debut at NAM with a poster flash presentation in the only astronomy-oriented code development session of the conference. Her poster topic is on utilising machine learning techniques to find and identify stellar tidal streams within Milky Way-type galaxies.
LIV.INNO’s deputy director, Dr. Andreea Font was involved by co-organising a session titled ‘Forging the elements: Understanding chemical evolution and stellar populations across cosmic time’, which ran throughout the whole of Wednesday.
Overall thoughts from our LIV.INNO participants about the NAM experience are very positive. ‘It was a great chance to network with primarily UK-based astronomers’ said Jonah. For a few, this was their first chance to introduce themselves to the wider astronomy community. ‘It was my first conference and I had so much fun. Also being my first talk as well I was both a bit excited and nervous’, noted Sakirçan. The conference upheld its reputation and proved to be a huge success with great organisation throughout, and an engaging and friendly environment.
The next edition of NAM has been officially announced to take place at the University of Birmingham in July 2026.