Introducing Adi Foord

Adi Foord is currently a fifth year PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, where she studies pairs of actively accreting supermassive black holes (aka, active galactic nuclei or “AGN”). She spends most of her time running her code BAYMAX (Bayesian AnalYsis of Multiple AGN in X-rays) on Chandra data, finding new AGN pairs and studying their preferential environments. 

In her free time Adi enjoys running, cross-stitch, and tending to her pepper plants. She loves to make a variety of interesting hot sauces throughout the summer using her home-grown peppers

She will be defending her thesis at the end of spring, and then will be moving to sunny California where she will continue studying AGN pairs as a Porat Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University.

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Introducing James Guillochon

James Guillochon is currently a postdoc at the Institute for Theory and Computation in the Harvard astronomy department. He studies the  tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes and supernovae, runs hydrodynamical simulations to figure out their physics, and compares model predictions to observed data. He maintains Vox Charta and the Open Astronomy Catalogs (AKA Astrocats)

Introducing Robert Fisher

This week features Robert Fisher. Bob is a computational astrophysicist primarily interested in the two endpoints in the lives of stars — stellar birth and death. He is keenly interested in the origin of a certain class of stellar explosions resulting from white dwarf stars, which astronomers have used to measure distances across the vast reaches of the cosmos — yet still do not fully understand. In his research, he seeks to understand the origins of these tremendous stellar explosions by simulating them on some of the world’s largest computers. As an assistant professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, he mentors an active research group of future computational astrophysicists and scientists, and engages the broader university student population in astronomy and physics education. He also serves on a variety of committees, at the national level, the state level, and the university-level, which seek to advance high-performance computing research across disciplines. Some time in between all of this, you’re likely to find him in the kitchen cooking Persian or Italian food with his wife, Pamela, an art historian. After this week, you’ll find him back at @fisherastro on Twitter.