Graduate Students
Drake Miller (CU Boulder, PhD, coadvised by Prof. Ann-Marie Madigan)
Drake’s research interests lie in various topics including intracluster medium (ICM) of galaxy clusters, Earth magnetosphere, and nuclear transients. Currently, he is working on magnetohydrodynamics modeling of accretion disks around merged supermassive black holes and their observable properties as electromagnetic counterparts to LISA/PTA gravitational wave sources.
Ky Putnam (CU Boulder, PhD, NSF Graduate Research Fellow)
Ky is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Ky’s research interests are broad, including Solar winds and nuclear transients. The current project investigate transient formation in active galactic nuclei and their observables, using moving-mesh magnetohydrodynamics simulations.
Undergraduate Students
Melissa Dow (CU Boulder)
Melissa majors in Physics. Her interests focus on nuclear transients and numerical simulations. Her current project examines how the tidal disruption radius, one of the most important characteristic distances in tidal disruption events, depends on the eccentricity of the initial stellar orbit.
Valeria Saldana (CU Boulder)
Valeria majors in Astrophysics with Computer Science, Mathematics, and Space Minors. She is interested in gravitational dynamics and gravitational waves. Her current project aims to understand the observable differences between black holes ejected via gravitational wave emission and those ejected through multi-body interactions with other black holes in merged galaxies.
Christopher Krueger (CU Boulder)
Christopher majors in Aerospace, aeronautical and Astronautical/Space Engineering. His interests cover from nuclear transients to stellar dynamics in nuclear stellar clusters. Currently, he is working on a project to examine the observational properties of “Tidal disruption encores”, events involving the disruption of stars by stellar-mass black holes orbiting supermassive black holes, when the stellar-mass black holes’ orbits are eccentric.
Sophie McAllen (CU Boulder)
Sophie majors in Astrophysics. Her research interests include nuclear transients and numerical simulations. Her current project focuses on the observables of quasi-periodic eruptions, repeating X-ray flares detected in galactic nuclei, using moving-mesh hydrodynamics simulations.