PhD defence Emma van der Wateren

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Clik here to view.© Maarten Joore, Peter Trúchly

On June 10th, Emma van der Wateren successfully defended her thesis titled "Illuminating the properties of radio pulsars and their binary companions through pulsar timing" at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. Emma worked under the supervision of Gemma Janssen and Cees Bassa as co-promotors and Gijs Nelemans as promotor on this joint PhD project between Nijmegen and ASTRON.

In her thesis, Emma used timing of radio pulsars with LOFAR, WSRT and other radio telescopes to study a wide variety of physical processes of pulsars and their binary companions, finding that pulsars discovered with LOFAR are generally older than pulsars discovered at higher frequencies, identifying a pulsar in a binary with very long orbital period, and assesing the timing stability of "a black widow pulsar binary for the use in experiments to detect gravitational waves.

Since October last year, Emma joined ASTRON as an instrument scientist.