Tim Johannsen (3rd year PhD)

Tim used the lack of observed orbital evolution in X-ray binaries harboring black holes to constrain the asymptotic curvature of the extra dimension in Randall-Sundrum type braneworld gravity. He is currently studying the observed characteristics of astrophysical black holes with spacetimes that have arbitrary multipole components.

Alan Cooney (2nd year PhD)

Alan is studying the cosmological evolution in non-linear and non-local gravity theories.

Wang Can (Exchange Undergraduate Student)

Wang Can is studying the viscous damping of hydrodynamic modes in accretion disks.

Chris Limbach (Physics Junior)

Chris (co-advised with F. Ozel) is studying the evolution of the MOND acceleration scale with redshift.

Martin Pessah (Currently: 3yr member, IAS Princeton)

Martin studied the properties of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in accretion disks, driven by the magnetorotational instability. Martin also explored the possibility of using X-ray variability to measure the masses of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies.

Chi-kwan Chan (Currently: ITC Fellow, Harvard University)

Chi-kwan (co-advised with F. Ozel) developed a parallel numerical algorithms in order to solve 2D and 3D magnetohydrodynamic astrophysical problems with spectral methods. In his research, he made extensive use of our group's Beowulf cluster. Movies and images from his simulations can be found here.

Delphine Perrodin (Graduate Student)

Delphine studied (also in collaboration with Keith Dienes and Irina Mocioiu) the constraints imposed on R2 gravity by astrophysical objects, such as neutron stars, and by recent cosmological observations.

Robert Marcus (currently PHD student, Harvard Univ.)

For his senior thesis, Robert developed (in collaboration with Chi-Kwan Chan) a 2D radiative transfer algorithm to solve diffusion problems in the atmospheres of neutron stars.

Sui Ann Mao (currently PhD student, Harvard Univ.)

For her senior thesis, Ann simulated (also in collaboration with Drew Milson) time-dependent accretion disks in one dimension, in an effort to understand the excitation mechanism of oscillations in such flows.

Simon DeDeo (currently Postdoctoral Fellow, U. Chicago)

I was Simon's co-advisor (with Ramesh Narayan) for his senior thesis at Harvard University. Simon calculated the pulsation amplitudes of thermally emitting neutron stars and placed constraints on their emission mechanisms. I also collaborated with Simon while we were both at Princeton, on constraining scalar-tensor gravity theories using X-ray observations of neutron stars.

Pavlin Savov (currently PhD Student, Caltech)

I was Pavlin's co-advisor (with Deepto Chakrabarty) for his senior thesis at MIT. Pavlin developed an automated method to search for X-ray bursts in RXTE data and characterize them. He then used his dataset in order to verify the claim that radius-expansion bursts have constant fluxes and to measure the distances of X-ray bursters in the galaxy.