Author: John Wise

Professor John Wise uses numerical simulations to study the formation and evolution of galaxies and their black holes. He is one of the lead developers of the community-driven, open-source astrophysics code Enzo and has vast experience running state-of-the-art simulations on the world’s largest supercomputers. He received his B.S. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001. He then studied at Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2007. He went on to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center just outside of Washington, DC as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow. Then in 2009, he was awarded the prestigious Hubble Fellowship which he took to Princeton University before arriving at Georgia Tech in 2011, coming back home after ten years roaming the nation.

Ph.D. Student Julia Speicher Awarded KITP Graduate Fellowship

Julia Speicher has been awarded the KITP Graduate Fellowship.

Julia Speicher, a fifth-year Ph.D. graduate student of Professor David Ballantyne, has received the competitive Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) Graduate Fellowship. As a part of Speicher’s fellowship, she will be a fully-funded resident of KITP from January to June 2024. There she will broaden her knowledge of the latest advances in astrophysics, overlapping with several long-term programs held at KITP at the University of California at Santa Barbara, under the mentorship of Prof. Omar Blaes.

Speicher studies the X-ray bursts from neutron stars, using sophisticated simulations on high-performance computing platforms. These simulations evolve the accretion disk around a neutron star, including the effects of general relativity, radiation transport, and hydrodynamics. Speicher has published three journal articles to date and has presented her work at several international conferences. Her research on X-ray bursts is essential to explain and interpret these observed extreme events and to understand the inner workings of accretion flows in a strong gravity regime near neutron stars.