Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Davis
I am honored and excited that the Institute for Defense Analyses has selected me to join the 2027-2028 class of the Defense Science Study Group. I will join 17 other professors from around the country to learn about United States defense policy, related research and development, and the systems, missions, and operations of our armed forces and intelligence community. This news article from UC Davis College of Letters & Science provides more detail.
UC Davis has selected Cecilia Steel for a Graduate Research Mentorship fellowship. Cecilia is one of only six fellows across UC Davis this year. This fellowship will fund 1 year of Cecilia’s PhD project. Congratulations Cecilia!
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.
NASA has selected Fiona McCluskey for a Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award! This grant will fund the final 2 years of Fiona’s PhD project: Deciphering Galactic Disk Formation: Galactic Archaeology in a Cosmological Context. Congratulations Fiona!
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!
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)Â 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!
NASA 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!
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded me 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.
This 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 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!
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!
Jenna Samuel, our group’s first graduating PhD student, has been awarded an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation! Jenna will take this fellowship to the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin this fall to pursue her project: Modeling the physics of gas removal and quenching in Local Group satellite galaxies with next-generation simulations. Congratulations Jenna!