School of Physics and CRA Ph.D. student Snigdaa Sethuram has been selected by The Simons Foundation for the 2021 Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics Pre-Doctoral Program.
The Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute is a vibrant research center in the heart of New York City with the mission of creating new computational frameworks that allow scientists to analyze big astronomical datasets and to understand complex, multi-scale physics in a cosmological context.
Snigdaa, who is part of Dr. John Wise’s Computational Cosmology group, will be working with 3 CCA mentors: Dr. Rachel Cochrane, Dr. Chris Hayward, and Dr. Shy Genel to build the neural network that will emulate the computationally intensive radiative transfer calculations that are traditionally done by high-performance computers on a select set of simulated galaxies. These calculations fully leverage all the simulated information and output observable properties of the galaxies while also significantly reducing the overall cost — enabling more regular comparisons of simulations to observations in the observer space, where the simulation informs the observable properties and not the other way around.
The CCA Pre-Doctoral Program enables graduate student researchers from institutions around the world to participate in the CCA mission by collaborating with CCA scientists for a period of 5 months on site. With this opportunity, Snigdaa and others will be able to participate in the many events at the CCA and interact with CCA scientists working on a variety of topics in computational astrophysics, thereby deepening and broadening their skill sets.
Congratulations Snigdaa, for this outstanding achievement!