news

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promotion to associate professor with tenure

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):

Vatche Sahakian (Harvey Mudd College)
Ann Esin (Harvey Mudd College)
Nels Hoffman (Los Alamos)
Simon Swordy (U Chicago)
Daniel Holz (Los Alamos)
Martin White (UC Berkeley)
Joanne Cohn (UC Berkeley)
Jeremey Tinker (UC Berkeley & NYU)
Frank van den Bosch (Yale U)
Daisuke Nagai (Yale U)
Marla Geha (Yale U)
Nitya Kallivayalil (Yale U & U Virginia)
Phil Hopkins (Caltech)
John Mulchaey (Carnegie Obs)
Josh Simon (Carnegie Obs)
Juna Kollmeier (Carnegie Obs)
Andrew Benson (Carnegie Obs)
James Bullock (UC Irvine)
Risa Wechsler (Stanford U)
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NSF CAREER award

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!

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Sky & Telescope article: plane of satellites

The Alignment of the Milky Way’s Entourage, Explained

Sky & Telescope highlighted our recent research in their article: The Alignment of the Milky Way’s Entourage, Explained. PhD student Jenna Samuel led this work, 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 has played in causing this planar structure.

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Jenna Samuel awarded NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship

Jenna Samuel

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!

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NASA Astrophysics Theory Program (ATP) grant: dark-matter subhalos and stellar streams

NASA’s Astrophysics Theory Program (ATP) has awarded our team (PI Robyn Sanderson, co-PI Andrew Wetzel) a grant for Predicting observable signatures for dynamical interactions between dark-matter substructure and stellar streams in the Milky Way. Congratulations to Robyn Sanderson, who led this grant!

The wealth of ongoing and upcoming observations of the Milky Way promise an era of ‘near-field cosmology’ to test the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm. One of the most exciting and powerful probes of dark matter is using the Milky Way’s stellar streams as ‘gravitational antennae’, as close passages of small dark-matter subhalos dynamically perturb cold stellar streams, allowing us to test the diverging predictions of different dark-matter models for the low-mass end of the (sub)halo mass function. Our goal with this grant is to use our Latte suite of FIRE-2 simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies to model the dynamics of dark-matter subhalo interactions with stellar streams from disrupted globular clusters and satellite galaxies in realistic detail, including creating synthetic observations of these simulated perturbed streams. Our goal is to provide the first comprehensive end-to-end study that connects cosmological predictions from baryonic simulations to interpretations of, and predictions for, observable perturbations from dark-matter subhalos on stellar streams.