About me
I'm an Astrophysics PhD student working at the University of Edinburgh. I'm interested in theoretical, observational, and particularly computational physics to study the first galaxies to form in the high-redshift universe.
Research
Current Research
Starting my PhD in autumn 2024, I am studying the chemical evolution of galaxies. Currently, I am comparing the effects of using different sets of yields from stellar evolution models, using my own one-zone GCE code. By the end of the PhD my work will extend to studying non-local and stochastically sampled IMFs, and full cosmological simulations. Hopefully we will be able to answer questions about the observed, and currently unexplained, abundances of high-redshift objects.
Previous Research
My masters project involved enhancing the yt and trident libraries with a new, 4D look-up table of ion data. This new table, generated from simulations ran with Cloudy, has an additional metallicity axis to interpolate over, allowing us to study the simulated CGM in detail. This was done by post-processing the FOGGIE simulation suite, measuring how metallicity and self-shielding change the physical properties of ions of interest. We had to produce a summary for the public, which you can read here.
In my undergraduate I undertook a research project studying high-redshift (z~5) quiescent galaxies using BAGPIPES to fit the SEDs of galaxies in the COSMOS field; generating a catalogue to look for the highest redshift quiescent candidates.
Teaching
I really enjoy teaching, working as a teaching assisstant for the following courses:
- Astrophysics: Stars and Planets — an honours course that teaches undergraduates about stellar evolution and (extra)solar small bodies.
- Astrophysics: Galaxies and Cosmology — the follow-up to stars and planets. Starting with nebulae in the milky way and building in scale through galaxies, ending with ΛCDM cosmology.
- Numerical Recipes — an honours programming course that introduces different algorithms and their implementation in libraries.
- Computational Astrophysics — a masters level course on smoothed-particle, grid-based, and particle-mesh methods for hydrodynamics problems.