Current NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellows

Kishalay De: NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow 2021- (future Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2024 – )
Kishalay De’s research interests lie in the transient optical/infrared sky to search for cataclysmic explosions in the Milky Way and in distant galaxies. He obtained his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 2021, where he worked on building the largest volume-limited sample of supernovae using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey to search for faint thermonuclear and core-collapse supernovae. His work led to the identification of new classes of explosions arising from helium shell detonations on white dwarfs and the deaths of extremely stripped massive stars. De helped build the first wide-field infrared time domain survey, Gattini-IR at Palomar Observatory, that surveys three quarters of the sky every two nights. By looking in the near-infrared, De’s work revealed a population of dust obscured eruptions (novae, X-ray binaries, microlensing events and young stars) that are missed in optical surveys. De is currently working on systematic searches for neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way via variable and erupting optical/infrared counterparts of Galactic X-ray sources, using time domain surveys like ZTF, Gattini-IR, WINTER and in the future, with the Vera Rubin observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.

Hsin-Yu Chen: NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow 2020-  (future Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2023 – )
Before coming to MIT in September 2020, Hsin-Yu Chen was a Black Hole Initiative Fellow at Harvard University. Hsin-Yu received her PhD from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago. Hsin-Yu’s research interest is in gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology. She’s a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the LISA Consortium. With Advanced LIGO-Virgo’s gravitational-wave detection of compact binary mergers, she is trying to answer the question of how old the Universe is—one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology. In addition, Hsin-Yu is helping to capture electromagnetic signals from the LIGO-Virgo’s binary mergers, so that the joint detections can shed light on the origin of the heavy elements in the Universe. Finally, the mergers of neutron stars observed by LIGO-Virgo will teach us how matter behaves at low-temperature and high-density environments—another question Hsin-Yu is trying to study.

Anna-Christina Eilers: NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellows 2019-   (future Pappalardo Fellow, 2022-2024)
Christina received her BSc in Physics from the University of Goettingen in Germany with a focus on neuroscience. After an internship at the European Space Agency in The Netherlands she decided to study astrophysics at the University of Heidelberg, from where she received her MSc. Eilers completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, working with Prof. Joseph Hennawi on high redshift quasars and the growth of supermassive black holes, as well as with Profs. Hans-Walter Rix and David W. Hogg on the dynamics of the Milky Way. Christina studies the formation and growth of supermassive black holes in the center of quasars and massive galaxies. As part of her PhD research, she developed a new method to estimate the lifetime of quasars that sets a timescale on which quasars accrete material to feed and grow their central black hole. She is particularly interested in the most distant known quasars, objects which date from when our universe was only a few hundred million years old. For the study of these very distant objects she uses large optical telescopes located in Chile and Hawaii, as well as various radio telescopes around the world. The goal of Eilers’s research is to understand how the first galaxies and black holes have formed, and how they evolved through cosmic time. She is also interested in developing new data-driven models to extract information from large data sets, and is working on modelling the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way with data from the Gaia space mission. Christina also enjoys public outreach and making astronomy more inclusive. She has worked at the Center for Astronomical Outreach and Education in Heidelberg, where she wrote articles for a popular science magazine and helped develop planetarium shows for visitors.

Aaron Smith: NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow 2018-
Aaron received bachelor degrees in physics and mathematics from Brigham Young University. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study theoretical astrophysics with Volker Bromm at the University of Texas at Austin. He finished his PhD in 2018. Aaron’s dissertation focused on modeling the Lyman-alpha line of atomic hydrogen, which is a powerful probe of the high-redshift universe due to its characteristic strength and spectral properties. He has developed novel methods to significantly accelerate Lyman-alpha simulations, so that full three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamical coupling for resonance lines becomes feasible. As an Einstein Fellow, he will apply multiple state-of-the-art radiative transfer schemes to a wide range of astrophysical settings, including high-resolution cosmological simulations to illuminate the galaxy and supermassive black hole formation process.

Past NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellows
Maximiliano Isi: NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow 2018-2021
Dheeraj (DJ) Pasham: NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow 2016-2019
Diana Dragomir: NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow 2016-2019
Paul Torrey: NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow 2016-2018
Rongmon Bordoloi: NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow 2015-2018
Jack Steiner: NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow 2015-2018
Joey Neilsen: NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow 2014-2017
Aleksander Sadowski: NASA Einstein Posdoctoral Fellow 2014-2017
Meng Su: NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow 2012-2015