What do I do?
I'm currently employed as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Zürich. My scientific interests are quiet varied, including gravitational lensing, structure formation, parallel computing, and chaos.
From 2009 until today, I have been working with Prasenjit Saha and the University of Zürich Zoology Museum to design a year-long exhibit show-casing the research behind the search for life in the Universe.
Keine grünen Männchen! Astrophysik und Biologie suchen nach Leben im All
will run from 5. April 2010 to 11. March 2011.
My funding comes from the High Performance and Productivity Computing grant connected with the Swiss National Supercomputing Center.
What is that picture?
The picture in the upper right is a false color image of the Bullet Cluster. There are actually two galaxy clusters in the photo that have passed through each other. The hot gas shown in pink has been shocked, emitting x-rays. The majority of the matter is shown in blue. Because of the enormous distances between them, the galaxies do not actually collide, but rather pass through each other like a collisionless material. However, from gravitational lensing we know that there is more mass there than that from the galaxies. It too has passed collisionlessly through the shocking gas. The Bullet Cluster provides strong evidence for the existence of dark matter.
