Lessons from the Local Group A Conference in honour of David Block and Bruce Elmegreen

Prof. Ken Freeman, FRS, is the Duffield Professor of Astronomy at the Australian National University. He has been bestowed with the highest accolade of the American Astronomical Society, the Henry Russell Norris Lecture. In 2012, he was awarded the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for Science. Freeman has devoted his career to the study of galaxies, and is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of dark matter. He has supervised 55 PhD students to date.

Dr. Bruce Elmegreen is a staff member in the Research Division of IBM. He received the 2001 Dannie Heineman Prize from the American Astronomical Society and the American Physical Society, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Prof. David Block is Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the only scientist in Africa whose research has twice been featured on the cover of Nature . A recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Award, Block and his team also spearheaded the discovery and amount of cold cosmic dust in our Universe using optical and near-infrared arrays. He has been a guest investigator at many of the world’s foremost universities and observatories, including Harvard University and the European Southern Observatory. Block co-authored the book Shrouds of the Night , published by Springer, together with Ken Freeman.

Matthew Woolway is a tutor in the School of Computational & Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His key focus lies in the domain of image and signal processing. He is a recipient of the Colin James Young Award.