I am a computational astrophysicist at The University of Chicago and an associate fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. I am interested in all aspects of galaxy formation, especially the interplay between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies and the metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium. Here in Chicago I am currently thinking about extremely high-resolution simulations of gas dynamics around supermassive black holes, the shapes of galaxy clusters, and working on the EAGLE project, an extremely large galaxy formation simulation.

I was a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden Observatory (2007-2011), where I worked mainly with Joop Schaye on (among other things) overwhelmingly large simulations of galaxy formation, metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium and the co-evolution of the black hole and galaxy populations. See my research page for further details.

I obtained my PhD on numerical modeling of the interstellar medium at Durham University (2003-2007) under the supervision of Tom Theuns. My PhD thesis is titled 'Simulating Molecular Cloud Regulated Star Formation in Galaxies', a pdf is available in the publications section of this site, along with links to the published papers that were taken from this thesis.

My undergraduate education occured Nottingham University (1999-2003) where I achieved a 1st class MSci. (Hons) in Physics with Astronomy, and had a lot of fun.