Faculty and Postdoctoral Researchers:

Stuart Vogel

Stuart Vogel is a radio astronomer working on star formation and the interstellar medium in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. He also has a Fabry-Perot spectrometer for studies of extended optical emission line objects. His optical interests include galactic nebulae, gas flows in galaxies, detection of ionized gas above and beyond the HI disks of galaxies, and measurement of the metagalactic ionizing flux.

Sylvain Veilleux

The research interests of Sylvain Veilleux center on understanding the nature, origin and impact of starburst/black-hole driven activity in galaxies, and on the formation and evolution of galaxies. Most of his work involves the analysis of ground-based observations at optical and infrared wavelengths supplemented with data obtained with astronomical satellites. He has also been involved in trying to put stronger constraints on the metagalactic ionizing flux and the gaseous extent of galaxies.

Stacy McGaugh

Stacy McGaugh studies galaxies, cosmology, and the mass discrepancy problem. His primary interest has been in low surface brightness galaxies, a recently recognized class of diffuse objects which tell us a great deal about galaxy formation and evolution in general.

Chris Reynolds

Chris Reynolds has performed substantial observational investigations into active galactic nuclei, with a particular emphasis on the diagnostic properties of the Fe K alpha line profile. He has also done a great deal of theoretical research focused on magnetohydrodynamics near the inner edges of accretion disks around black holes. He has shown that significant energy may be extracted from inside the innermost stable circular orbit around black holes, either from the rotation of the black holes themselves or from MHD interactions. The initial work has used a pseudo-Newtonian potential formalism with simple equations of state, but Reynolds intends to expand this investigation to fully relativistic disks with more realistic equations of state.

Alberto Bolatto

Alberto Bolatto pursues several lines of extragalactic research in the nearby and high-redshift universe, including studies of molecular gas and star formation in galaxies, galaxy kinematics and dark matter, molecular cloud structure, radio searches for atomic and molecular transitions at high redshift, and S³MC/S⁴MC, a Spitzer Space Telescope Cycle-1/Cycle-3 project for imaging and spectroscopy of the Small Magellanic Cloud in the mid- and far-infrared.

Eve Ostriker

Eve Ostriker's extragalactic research focuses on the structure and evolution of disk galaxies. Her expertise is theoretical, and her work uses large-scale numerical hydrodynamics and MHD simulations as well as analytic models. Ongoing extraglactic research projects include studies of galactic-scale origins of star-forming clouds, causes and effects of turbulence in the interstellar medium, spiral-arm spur development, and the global regulation of star formation. She also works in close collaboration with faculty, postdocs, and students within the Laboratory for Millimeter-Wave Astronomy in modeling and interpreting radio observations of structure and kinematics in external galaxies.

Massimo Ricotti

Massimo Ricotti's main interest is in theoretical cosmology. He is currently studying the first epochs of galaxy and star formation in the Universe using large-scale numerical simulations to understand which physical processes and feedbacks are important for the formation of early galaxies. In addition, he studies the evolution of the intergalactic medium (IGM) from which they form, investigating the thermal and reionization history of the IGM and of the Lyman-alpha forest. He is also interested in the physics of the interstellar medium, focusing on galaxies with nearly primordial composition and damped Lyman-alpha systems.

DongChan Kim

DongChan Kim's primary research interests are imaging and spectroscopic studies of the luminous infrared galaxies (LIGs), ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIGs), and QSOs. Currently, he is involved in data reduction and analysis of the HST/NICMOS imaging and SPITZER IRS spectra of the ULIGs and QSOs. The main goal of these studies is try to understand evolutionary connection between ULIGs and QSOs. He is also interested in developing database archive systems and CGI programing.