Leadership
Alan Calder
DCD Deputy Director
I am an associate professor in the Astronomy Group within the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University. My research is in the field of nuclear astrophysics, and my work involves simulating explosive astrophysical phenomena. I also have extensive experience with large-scale computing.
Prior to coming to Stony Brook, I had research appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the University of Chicago, where I was at the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes. I was also an instructor at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.
My research is principally in bright stellar explosions known as Type Ia supernovae. These events produce and disseminate heavy elements and are therefore important for galactic chemical evolution. Also, the light curves of these events can be standardized and thereby used as distance indicators for cosmology studies investigating the expansion history of the Universe. I perform detailed simulations of these events to explore how factors such as the age or composition of the progenitor affect the brightness of an event. Understanding such systematic effects is critical to addressing the issue of the intrinsic scatter of these events, a source of significant uncertainty in cosmological studies.
