Conny Aerts obtained her mathematics diploma from Antwerp University in 1988 and defended her PhD thesis in astrophysics at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1993. She was a postdoctoral fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research of Flanders from 1993 until 2001, performing numerous short stays abroad in Europe, Chile and the USA. She was appointed as lecturer (2001), as Associate Professor (2004) and subsequently as Full professor (2007) at Leuven University. Since 2004, she also occupies the Chair in Asteroseismology at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.  She was vice-president (2000-2003) and president (2003-2006) of Commission 27: Variable Stars of the International Astronomical Union.

Conny's research expertise concerns stellar astrophysics with subjects stellar structure, stellar evolution, variable stars and asteroseismology. Throughout the years, and with the operation of the CoRoT and Kepler missions, she focused more and more on asteroseismic studies for various types of stars in different evolutionary phases, covering the entire so-called Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram.

She published research containing a full end-to-end asteroseismic analysis. This requires skills in writing competitive observing proposals, in raw data gathering at the telescope, in specialised data reduction, in frequency analysis of unevenly spaced gapped time series, in mode identification and in stellar modeling.  This interdisciplinarity requires one to be an astronomer as well as an astrophysicist, with excellent skills in statistics and numerical computing. Her team managed to go through this whole chain to come up with the first detection of non-rigid rotation inside a massive star.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1084993v1?ijkey=LOu4O8nI3qOXk&keytype=ref&siteid=sci

With the preparation of the CoRoT and Kepler mission data exploitation in mind, statistical mining of large databases became another key aspect of the Conny's team's expertise. She took up this science topic  at the start of her postdoctoral career to be ready by the time the public catalogue of the ESA Hipparcos space mission became available. She developed a statistical classification method based on multivariate Gaussian mixtures and discovered numerous new slowly pulsating B

stars and γ Doradus stars.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1998A%26A...330..215W

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1998A%26A...337..790A

She subsequently started huge long-term follow-up ground-based multicolour and spectroscopic observing campaigns (assigned by peer-review at ESO) of the most interesting new pulsators

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999A%26A...343..872A

This large undertaking led to the very first physical understanding of gravity modes in main-sequence stars and constituted the PhD works of:

Dr. Peter De Cat

http://www.ster.kuleuven.be/pub/decat_phd/

http://www.ster.kuleuven.be/pub/briquet_phd/

The automated classification of variable stars is meanwhile a scientific expertise pole at K.U.Leuven, with responsibilities for such datamining of:

1. • the CoRoT exoplanet (launched 27/12/2006)
   

Dr. Jonas Debosscher

http://www.ster.kuleuven.be/pub/debosscher_phd/

1. • the Kepler space data (launched 7 March 2009),
   

2. • the Gaia space data (to be launched mid 2013)
   

Along with her appointment on the Chair in Asteroseismology at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Conny introduced herself into the topic of subdwarf stars and their binarity and oscillations. The recruitement of:

Dr. Roy Østensen (Leuven)

Dr. Maja Vuckovic (Leuven)

http://www.ster.kuleuven.be/pub/vuckovic_phd/

Dr. Haili Hu (PhD funded 50% Leuven, 50% Nijmegen)

http://www.ster.kuleuven.be/pub/hu_phd/

led to the creation of a scientific expertise pole in asteroseismology of subdwarf stars. Achievements until 2010 were summarized in the PhD theses of Maja and Haili. Later results on subdwarf stars can be found through ADS.

Conny is a member of several international expert committees and advisory bodies worldwide in her research topics. She is Belgian co-Investigator of the French-led European CoRoT space mission, is member of the Steering Committee of NASA’s Kepler mission Asteroseismology Programme, is involved in the future ESA Gaia mission, and is Belgian PI in the proposing team of the ESA PLATO mission project.

Until 2010, Conny was the supervisor of 36 Master theses and of 16 graduated PhD students. She teaches 5 astrophysics courses of 6 ECTS each per year. She presently leads a research team of 6 PhD students, 7 postdocs, 2 engineers and a project coordinator.

Conny is married and mother of two children, born in 1994 and 1998. When not working and not with her children, you can find her jogging, dining in fancy restaurants with friends, @ the movie theatre, @ the sauna, or sipping champagne while reading a novel.