John Wise
Associate Professor
Professor John Wise uses numerical simulations to study the formation and evolution of galaxies and their black holes. He is one of the lead developers of the community-driven, open-source astrophysics code Enzo and has vast experience running state-of-the-art simulations on the world’s largest supercomputers. He received his B.S. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001. He then studied at Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2007. He went on to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center just outside of Washington, DC as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow. Then in 2009, he was awarded the prestigious Hubble Fellowship which he took to Princeton University before arriving at Georgia Tech in 2011, coming back home after ten years roaming the nation.
I study the intricacies of both the distant and nearby universe, using state-of-the-art numerical simulations that are run on the world’s largest supercomputers. We are especially interested in the first billion years of the universe, where the building blocks of today’s galaxies assembled, forming the first stars and galaxies in the universe. Between 300,000 and 50 million years after the Big Bang, the universe was a relatively simple place with neither stars nor galaxies, only darkness. The evolution of the universe during this epoch is well described by analytics. Afterwards, cosmic structures grow non-linearly, and it is further complicated by star and galaxy formation. This is where numerical cosmology simulations come into play. Simulations strive to include all of the relevant physics and resolve the relevant length scales to accurately model this non-linear regime.
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