Michael Zingale

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook, working in the Astronomy Group.

Before coming to Stony Brook, I was a postgraduate researcher in the Astronomy and Astrophysics department at UC Santa Cruz, working with theSupernovae Science Center. I was formerly a research associate (and graduate student before that) at theCenter on Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at theUniversity of Chicago, where I was a co-developer of theFLASH Code. I did my undergraduate at the University of Rochester.

My main research interests involve computational astrophysics (particularly the development of new hydrodynamics methods for low Mach number astrophysical flows) and nuclear astrophysics (in particular, studying anything that blows up). This work is done in collaboration with the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering at LBL. Recently, we finished extending this low Mach number method to the full star, creating theMaestro code. This method is more general than the traditional anelastic method, as it can evolve finite-amplitude density and temperature perturbations to a hydrostatic background and can also evolve this background state in response to the local heating.

I apply these low Mach number methods to studying problems in nuclear astrophysics, such as:

• Type Ia supernovae. Examples of applications at small scales in white dwarfs include studies of the Landau-Darrieus instability, reactive Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, and buoyant reacting bubbles. On the full star scale, we've modeled theconvection preceding the explosion of a Chandrasekhar mass white dwarf and have now turned our attention toconvection in sub-Chandra models. This work is ongoing.
• X-ray bursts. Earlier work involved using fully compressible hydrodynamics methods to study Type I X-ray bursts (likespreading of perturbations, and somewhat related helium detonations). Currently, I am working with Chris Malone to model convection in mixed H/He X-ray bursts.

I'm also working with the compressible Castro code to model merging white dwarfs (this is together with Alan Calder and Doug Swesty).

I have a number of code examples online and I am developing a set of notes and associated code (pyro) to teach students the basic methods of hydrodynamics used in astrophysics.

Further back, I was one of the original developers of the FLASH Code. This code has seen wide adoption for astrophysical problems involving compressible flows.

My XRB/supernovae and low Mach number hydrodynamics research is supported primiarily by a grant from the the Dept. of Energy, Office of Nuclear Physics. The white dwarf merger studies are supported by the NSF.

Education:

• Ph.D., Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago (2000) 
  thesis: Helium Detonations on Neutron Stars
• M.S., Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago (1998)
• B.S., Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester (1996)

Awards:

• President Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE). Nominated by DOE NNSA. (2006) 
  Photo of the DOE Ceremony showing Secretary of Energy, Samuel Bodman, myself, NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Thomas P. D'Agostino and DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr. Raymond L. Orbach.
• DOE Office of Nuclear Physics Outstanding Junior Investigator (OJI) Award for a proposal entitled: ``Multidimensional Modeling of Astrophysical Thermonuclear Explosions'' (2006)
• Gordon Bell Award in High Performance Computing, Special Category (2000) for a paper entitled ``High-Performance Reactive Fluid Flow Simulations Using Adaptive Mesh Refinement on Thousands of Processors'', Calder et al. 2000. (SC 2000 conference)