I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Dark Matter group at the Institute for Astronomy at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. The homepage for the group can be found here. I obtained my PhD from the University of Leicester, UK, where I was a member of the Theoretical Astrophysics group, the homepage for which can be found here.My research interests include galaxy mergers, accretion onto supermassive black holes, accretion discs and feedback processes therein, active galactic nuclei (AGN) and our own Galactic centre. I work mainly on simulating the behaviour of these astronomical curiosities with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) codes, currently GADGET (version 3), which is an N-body/SPH code designed to run on massively-parallel computers with distributed memory. It was developed by Volker Springel at the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics. To run the code I make use of state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities at the ETH Zurich and the University of Leicester. My research consists of four main areas:
i) using numerical and analytical methods to set up realistic initial conditions for gaseous and stellar distributions along with background gravitational potentials
ii) adapting the GADGET code (adding new physics, numerical prescriptions etc.) in order to use it for the area of research I am interested in
iii) writing extensive analysis code (using IDL or Python) to post-process the results of the simulation
iv) using theoretical arguments to understand the evolution of the simulation and shed light on observations as well as astrophysics within a wider context
For more information about this research please visit the ETH Institute for Astronomy homepage and the GADGET homepage.