He Gao successfully defends his PhD and will move on to Penn State.

Dr. Gao arrived at UNLV in 2010 as member of Professor Zhang's group. He has been quite productive, publishing five first author papers and coauthoring seven more. Next year he will begin a postdoctoral position at Penn State working with Peter Meszaros. Below is the abstract to his thesis defense held earlier today:

Physics of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs): Gamma-ray bursts are most luminous explosions in the universe. Their ejecta are believed to move towards Earth with a relativistic speed, and a certain fraction of its kinetic energy will be released in electromagnetic channel, both in prompt gamma-ray emission and in late time broad-band afterglow emission. This part of the thesis first invents a new signal process method to study the GRB prompt light curves, then gives a review for a complete reference of all the analytical synchrotron external shock afterglow models and finally makes a detailed discussion about radiation mechanism for GRBs. Milti-messenger signals from double neutron star merger: As the technology of gravitational-wave and neutrino detectors becomes increasingly mature, a multi-messenger era of astronomy is ushered in. Since double neutron star merger serves as the top candidate for ground-breaking discovery of gravitational wave signals with advanced gravitational wave detectors, this part of the the thesis studies the possible electromagnetic (EM) and neutrino emission counterparts of this intriguing scenario, especially when the post-merger product is magnetar instead of black hole. Observational strategy and likely evidence for the relevant EM counterpart are also discussed.

PhD Student Tim Waters receives a summer school fellowship at Los Alamos.

A fourth-year graduate student working with Daniel Proga, Tim was admitted into the 4th Los Alamos Space Weather Summer School, where he will attend lectures and undertake a research project on plasma instabilities with a Los Alamos scientist. The school lasts for seven weeks and Tim will receive a $10,000 fellowship.

Daniel Proga was awared a prestigious NASA theory grant.

This $500,000 grant was awarded to Professor Proga to continue investigating the highly dynamical environments of supermassive black hole systems, which requires the use the numerical simulations run on supercomputers.  The grant money will enable him to strengthen his research efforts by supporting postdoctoral scholars and graduate students.

Prof. Bing Zhang received a 3-year NASA grant.

The NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP) program allocated Dr. Zhang a total budget of $378,244 for his proposal entitled "Understanding GRB physics with multi-wavelength data", which will allow Zhang's team to study several aspects of GRB physics, including the jet composition, energy dissipation mechanism, radiation mechanism, progenitor, and central engine, all using multi-wavelength data provided by NASA missions Fermi and Swift.

Former undergraduate student Jason Jaacks is headed to UT Austin!

Jason Jaacks has been a star undergraduate student working in Prof. Nagamine's group, having just submitted his third research paper for publication. He was the subject of a feature article written by Shane Bevell. He graduated in December and is off to UT Austin for graduate school in astrophysics.

Robert Thompson finishes his PhD and moves on to University of Arizona.

Combining passion for astronomy and a knack for computational science, Robert Thompson, who just became Dr. Thompson this month, completed his bachelor's, Master's, and doctoral degrees at UNLV. He completed his MS and PhD theses under Prof. Nagamine, studying galaxy formation and the large scale structure of the universe. Next month he will move to Tucson to begin postdoctoral research under Romeel Dave at UofA, which has a world renowned astrophysics department. In the second year of his postdoc he will relocate to South Africa to finish his postdoc at the University of The Western Cape.

Prof. Ken Nagamine was awarded the Chandra theory grant.

A research grant of $67,631 is awarded by the NASA Chandra program to Dr. Nagamine.  This grant is for support of the project entitled, “Discriminating different AGN feedback models with multi-scale hydrodynamic simulations."