Biography

I am an astrophysicist specialising in numerical simulations and galaxy dynamics. My research interests lie outside our own galaxy – in trying to understand how the diversity of galaxies that we observe around us have formed and evolved, specifically by studying their stellar kinematic signatures. I am also keen to develop tools that allow us to more readily compare our observations and simulations. This interest extends to studying how reliable our simulations are, especially concerning velocity structure and the formation and evolution of thin galactic disks.

I have recently completed a PhD in computational astrophysics under the supervision of Chris Power and Aaron Robotham at the UWA node of ICRAR, in which I developed a code for generating mock observations of N-body and hydro-dynamical simulations and examined the effects that seeing conditions have on the kinematics we recover from IFU surveys. I am from the UK, having completed my undergraduate MSci Physics with Astronomy degree at the University of Nottingham. During that time, my research projects covered a broad range of topics – from the analysis of merger detection statistics in semi-analytic models to the study of galaxy dynamics and gas stripping using Chandra archival data.

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