Author: awetzel

Associate Professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of California, Davis
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PECASE award

President Biden has named me as one of nearly 400 recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers who show exceptional potential for leadership. I am one of 7 faculty at UC Davis honored with PECASE this year, including two of us within the College of Letters & Science. I am grateful to the National Science Foundation for nominating me for this award.

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Dr. Matt Bellardini

Dr. Matt Bellardini

Dr. Matt Bellardini is our group’s third graduating PhD student! He completed his PhD dissertation on Chemical Evolution Across Cosmic Time: Stellar Elemental Abundance Patterns and Radial Redistribution in Cosmological Simulations. Matt is searching for industry jobs in the Seattle area. Congratulations Dr. Bellardini!

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Pratik Gandhi awarded Frontera Fellowship

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) 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!

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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 2023, 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 up to 39 snapshots each across z = 0 to 10, as well as halo/galaxy catalogs, merger trees, formation coordiantes for each star particle, and 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.