Snigdaa Sethuram, a Ph.D. graduate student of professor John Wise, has been selected for the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) program. The FINESST program awards funding for research projects that are designed and executed by graduate students and contribute to NASA’s science, technology and exploration goals.
Sethuram is the second student in Dr. Wise’s Computational Cosmology group to receive the FINESST award. This fellowship will cover three years of funding for her to complete her thesis project, AI-enhanced Simulations and Synthetic Observations of the First Galaxies and Active Galactic Nuclei. She will be using machine learning techniques to speed up cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of the first galaxies and resolve them further in post-processing, and will be running a large-volume cosmological simulation with her final model.
The final machine learning network is intended for use by anyone simulating early galaxy formation, and synthetic observations of the large-volume simulation should aid in interpreting the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations. Sethuram hopes that the end products will be impactful in generating more resources to understand galactic evolution.