Dark Matter and Supermassive Black Holes in Extreme Galaxies

Aaron Romanowsky is an associate professor of physics & astronomy at San José State University (SJSU). He was an undergraduate in physics at UC Santa Barbara and did his doctoral research in astronomy at Harvard on dark matter, gravitational lensing, and supermassive black holes. He then criss-crossed the globe in search of exciting galactic data in the Netherlands, England, Chile, and UC Santa Cruz. He now works at the interface of telescope observations, computer simulations, and machine learning to understand the nature of dark matter and the origins of galaxies and star clusters. He leads a team of students at SJSU in search of the most extreme stellar systems in the universe, recently discovering the densest known galaxies and now pursuing the fluffiest galaxies. He is co-director of Cal-Bridge, a program to support CSU undergraduates in pursuing doctoral studies in physics and astronomy.

Room 225