About

Hello, I’m Brendan Boyd, a PhD student in the Physics & Astronomy Department at Stony Brook University and a member of the Nuclear Astro group, working with Alan Calder. My research focuses on studying Type Ia Supernovae progenitors using hydrodynamic simulations. These simulations track the slow moving reactive flow in the core of a white dwarf star. To run these simulations we take must advantage of HPC resources and parallel computing. I graduated from Michigan State University with a B.S. in Astrophysics. At MSU I worked with Devin Silvia and Brian O’Shea studying the Circumgalactic Medium via galactic simulations as a part of the FOGGIE collaboration.

My Disseratation research is studying the convective Urca process in White Dwarfs with Dr. Alan Calder. To do this we are utilizing the AMReX based code MAESTROeX. This is a continuation of the work done by Don Willcox, and represents the first full 3D simulations of this process, see this ApJ article for the first set of simulations. Recently, with the help of a visiting student we have shown the somewhat limited effect of the convective Urca process, read more here Presentations and Posters presented at various conferences can be seen here. A collection of visualizations from these simulations are shown on the videos page

Near the end of my time at Michigan State, I created the python package SALSA which was then published in JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software). The package uses multiple other open-source python packages to make a streamlined analysis pipeline to generate synthetic observations from galactic simulation data. More information on that package can be found in the JOSS paper and the documentation made for the tool.

Outside of research type stuff, I enjoy reading and watching movies which I track on my letterboxd. I’ve gotten increasingly interested in baking bread and have a gallery of my favorite loaves here.