About Me
I am an astrophysicist, currently working in the beautiful city of Prague. I grew up in a small village in Austria, Southeast Styria (Südoststeiermark). There I lived at the joinery of my father and mother, with my four siblings, my grandmother, and a bunch of cats, geese, and chickens. My fascination for our night sky, stars, and the universe was originally initiated by my older brother, Ronni, who was the first science nerd in our family. While reading the astro books he had gathered and using his rotatable star chart, I started to become interested in the night sky, the stars, and the immense vastness of the Universe.
Image © Josef Franz Großschedl 2020
Image © ESO/VISION Stefan Meingast et al. 2016
My fascination for the stars eventually led me to study Astronomy at the University of Vienna, where I gained my PhD in 2021 under the supervision of João Alves. After completing a short PostDoc position in Vienna, I started a PostDoc and Teaching position in 2023 at the Physics Department of the University of Cologne in the group of Stefanie Walch-Gassner.
The left image shows the Orion Nebula, observed in infrared light with the ESO/VISTA telescope, observed by the Vienna Survey in Orion (VISION, PI: J.Alves, Image: Stefan Meingast). The Orion Nebula is one of the few star-forming regions in the night sky that is visible to the naked eye. This region in Orion was one of the main targets of my PhD thesis. Orion is a prominent target for Astronomers, because it is the closest massive star-forming region to Earth, this means, it still forms very massive stars, which produce the necessary energy to bring the nebula to shine.
In September 2024 I moved to Prague to start my current postdoctoral fellowship in the research group of Jan Palouš and Richard Wünsch,
at the Astronomical Institute (ASU) of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) -
Astronomický ústav Akademie věd České republiky.
My fellowship is funded by
MERIT
(MSCA-COFUND Horizon Europe - Grant agreement
101081195),
which is co-funded by the European Union, the
Central Bohemian Region,
and the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Image © Josefa Großschedl 2024
Image © Simon Spitzer, Josefa Großschedl 2025
From Oktober 2025 to February 2026 I am completing a Secondment (research visit) at the
TU Berlin (Fachgruppe Astronomie und Astrophysik FGAA)
as part of the MERIT fellowship.
There I collaborate with the group of
Dieter Breitschwerdt.
We are interested in past interactions of our Solar System with its Galactic environment with.
We study the orbital path of the Sun in relation to young stars and young clusters to better understand the origin of certain radioisotopes that have been found in Earth's crust.
Radioisotopes like Iron-60 are primarily formed in supernova events, hence, when massive stars die.
Massive stars die young, therefore, we are tracing the known young clusters in the Solar Neighborhood to test how close we have come to them in the past.
