RESEARCH TEAM
My research team at the University of Hertfordshire (UH) works on developing computational simulations to better understand galaxy evolution.
We predominantly do this using the family of L-Galaxies simulations developed in-house.
Paurush Punyasheel
PhD candidate (UH)
Paurush works on developing the pyGalaxies simulation - a user-friendly version of L-Galaxies designed to have an intuitive python front-end and a range of synthetic observables as output.
pyGalaxies will enable the entire astrophysics community to quickly & easily model large samples of galaxies within a self-consistent physical framework.
Diederick Vroom
PhD candidate (UH)
Diederick works on implementing complex molecule formation into the L-Galaxies-C simulation using gas-grain models.
This will allow us to probe the most detailed interstellar medium (ISM) chemistry in a cosmological-scale simulation to date - an important step towards modelling life across the Universe!
COLLABORATORS
We also work closely with a number of internal and external collaborators
on L-Galaxies related projects.
Andrew Green
PhD candidate (UH, under supervision of Carolyn Devereux, Raimund Kirner, & Uwe Naumann)
Andrew works on developing L-Galaxies-AD, a highly optimised and auto-differentiable version of the L-Galaxies simulation, allowing efficient and exact evaluation of partial derivatives.
L-Galaxies-AD will enable the direct application of gradient-based Bayesian Inference (BI) when tuning simulation parameters, making calibration much more rigorous and efficient than has been possible before.
Daniele Spinoso
PostDoc (University of Milano-Bicocca)
Daniele works on developing cutting-edge prescriptions for black hole (BH) seeding and growth in the L-Galaxies-BH version of the simulation.
This BH modelling has also been integrated into L-Galaxies-C, allowing us to probe the detailed co-evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes (SMBHs) on cosmological scales for the first time.