ABOUT ME
I am a PhD student doing computational astrophysics with Rodrigo Fernández at the University of Alberta. My research topics focus on transient events from compact object mergers, such as kilonovae. In particular, I simulate the late-time mass outflows from the newly formed system using the magnetohydrodynamical code FLASH. Other members of the research group are Mario Ivanov and Coleman Dean
My skills include programming in FORTRAN and Python. I have a extensive experience bending FLASH to my will, including modifying the unsplit magnetohydrodynamic solver to work in 3D spherical coordinates. I use bash scripting to streamline the running of simulations and a combination of FORTRAN and Python for data analysis and creating pretty pictures of the work after the simulations are finished.
Aside from this, I enjoy teaching. As a teaching assistant for the undergraduate labs since 2017, I try to make sure that each student who leaves my laboratories likes physics a little more than when they entered.
When I'm not slaving away in CCIS, you can generally find me at home amusing myself with my cat or things that have "Star" in their name (StarCraft, Star Trek, Stargate...) My sister, Amy Fahlman, has summed all this up in my cover image for me.
RESEARCH
This bad boy right below is a gif showing a simulation of the evolution of a 3 dimensional equilibrium torus surrounding a HMNS, taken from work I did with my supervisor. You can imagine the 2D view shown here as cutting a bagel in half and then looking at it edge on. It shows the density starting from the initial torus up until about 200 milliseconds, where you can continually see the high density (pink) torus evaporate into lower density outflows (blue and purple). The torus forms about 50 km away from the hypermassive neutron star, which is the highest density (yellow) region in the center. The hypermassive neutron star collapses to a black hole 10 ms in (see if you can catch it). The sudden jumps are changes in the simulation time: We first evolve it quite slowly and then speed things up once it starts getting closer and closer to a steady state.
RESUME
PhD Physics, University of Alberta (2019-2023*)
MSc Physics, University of Alberta (2017-2019)
BSc Honours, Astrophysics, University of Calgary, (2013-2017)