Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Davis
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 College of Letters & Science highlighted our recent research in their article: Simulations Explain Abundance of Bright Galaxies Observed at Cosmic Dawn. We showed how bursty star formation in our FIRE-2 simulations of galaxy formation naturally explains the abundance of bright galaxies in the early universe as the James Webb Space Telescope has observed.
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!
Dr. lsaiah Santistevan is our group’s second graduating PhD student! He completed his PhD dissertation on Modelling the Formation and Evolution of Satellite Galaxies in Cosmological Simulations. He will start as a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Congratulations Dr. Santistevan!
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!
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.
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!
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!
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 acknowledge and sincerely thank all of my mentors in (astro)physics over the last 18 years who helped me arrive at this point, including (but by no means limited to):