Remudin Mekuria
Astronomer
Johannesburg, South Africa | born in Ethiopia
Outreach Education Activity and Fun
Remudin Reshid Mekuria is an Assistant Professor in Astrophysics in the College of Natural and Computational Sciences at the Department of physics Addis Ababa University since July, 2017. Currently he is involved in both delivering various physics and astrophysics courses at both under- and post-graduate levels, and supervision of PhD and master’s student’s on various research topics in the field of Astrophysics.
Remudin started perusing his career in the field of astrophysics in 2006 by joining the Department of Physics at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia as a master’s student immediately after completing his bachelor degree in physics from Dilla University.
Through this program, he carried out research entitled “Gamma Ray Production from an Accreting Neutron Stars using Inverse Compton Scattering of Lower Frequency Photons by Relativistic Electrons”. Having completed his master’s degree, in between 2008 and 2010, he has worked as a full time lecturer at Adama Science and Technology University, and later at Addis Ababa University offering courses at undergraduate level and also assisting various courses related to astrophysics at graduate levels.
For his second master’s degree, in 2010, he won a scholarship to be enrolled in AstroMundus, a two-years Erasmus Mundus joint master’s program in Astrophysics. Through this mobile program, he has studied at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, University of Roma, “Tor Vergata” in Italy, and the University of Gottingen in Germany. During his stay for full year at the University of Gottingen, he worked on his second master’s thesis work which focuses on research areas of turbulence and magnetic fields in galaxy clusters on a thesis topic entitled “Hydrodynamical studies for cosmology”. He obtained a joint master’s degree from all the universities under the consortium in December, 2012.
In 2013 he started working on his PhD research at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he used high resolution cosmological simulations containing dark matter, gas, star formation and feedback to develop analytical models that help to study multi-wavelength emission in a galaxy cluster from dark matter annihilation processes on a thesis topic: “Multi-wavelength emissions from dark matter annihilation processes in galaxy clusters using cosmological simulations” and graduated in July, 2017.
During his study and work time both at home and abroad Remudin has been largely involved in educating the public by providing a number of public lectures on topics of space science, astronomy and astrophysics, organizing outreach programs at schools, establishing and strengthening astronomy clubs and regional branches, for example, of Ethiopian Space Science Society (ESSS), as well as providing short term trainings for large number of students from Ethiopia and demonstrated various physics experiments in the laboratory at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.