UC Davis Graduate Studies has selected me to receive a Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award for outstanding service in advising and mentoring graduate students. I am honored that the PhD students in my group nominated me for this award!
Pratik Gandhi awarded Frontera Fellowship
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has selected Pratik Gandhi for a Frontera Computational Science Fellowship! This fellowship will provide one year of tuition and stipend, including a computing allocation on Frontera and collaboration and mentorship with members of TACC, for Pratik’s PhD project: Near-Far Connection: Using the Stellar Fossil Record of Local Group Dwarf Galaxies to Probe the Epoch of Reionization. Congratulations Pratik!
public data release of the FIRE-2 simulations
Nearly all of our FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations of galaxy formation are now publicly available!
In Wetzel et al 2022, we describe this public data release (DR1) of the FIRE-2 simulations, available at flathub.flatironinstitute.org/fire. DR1 contains full snapshots from 46 different simulations, spanning massive to Milky Way-mass to ultra-faint galaxies, with snapshots across z = 0 to 6, and halo/galaxy catalogs as well as additional data products. We provide a comprehensive description of the FIRE-2 simulations and data products, and we describe various publicly available python analysis packages to make reading and using these simulations easier.
This DR1 extends our initial data release (DR0) of a subset of FIRE-2 simulations, which contained complete snapshots of 3 of our Latte simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies at z = 0, accompanied by our Ananke synthetic Gaia DR2-like surveys that we created from these simulations (Sanderson et al 2020), which are available via yt Hub at ananke.hub.yt.
Dr. Jenna Samuel
Dr. Jenna Samuel is our group’s first graduating PhD student! She completed her PhD dissertation on Local Group Satellite Galaxies in Cosmological Simulations. She will start as an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin. Congratulations Dr. Samuel!
Isaiah Santistevan awarded NASA FINESST
NASA has selected Isaiah Santistevan for a Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award! This grant will fund the final 2 years of Isaiah’s PhD project: Modeling the Cosmological Evolution of Satellite Dwarf Galaxies in 6D Phase Space. Congratulations Isaiah!
promotion to associate professor with tenure
Today I received my official letter from the Chancellor at UC Davis that (as of July 1) I will be promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. I sincerely acknowledge and thank in particular all of my mentors in (astro)physics over the last ~18 years who helped me arrive at this point.
NSF CAREER award
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded me and our group a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant of $800,117 for Galactic Archeology: Understanding the Building Blocks of the Milky Way across Cosmic Time.
Article from UC Davis College of Letters & Science highlights this award.
With this award, we seek to model and understand how our Milky Way and similar galaxies formed across cosmic time. We also will develop a library of interactive Jupyter notebook tutorials, based on these simulations, to promote learning in computational analysis. Thank you to all current and former members of my group, as well as the FIRE collaboration, for helping to enable this science!
UC Davis article highlights our research
An article from the UC Davis College of Letters & Science has highlighted our research, which PhD student Isaiah Santistevan led, to understand how a merger with another galaxy likely shaped the orbits of the most ancient and metal-poor stars in our Milky Way galaxy today.
Samantha Benincasa awarded President’s Postdoctoral Scholarship at OSU
Samantha Benincasa, postdoc in our group 2018-2020 and ongoing collaborator, has been selected as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ohio State University. Congratulations Sam!
Sky & Telescope article highlights our research
Sky & Telescope has highlighted our research, which PhD student Jenna Samuel led, to understand the origin of the thin plane of satellite galaxies around the Milky Way, including the likely important role that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) has played in causing this planar structure.