About

Hello, I’m Brendan Boyd, a graduate 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 hydrodyanmic simulations. 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.

Currently, I am working on 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. Posters on the work can be seen here ASTRONUM, AAS. A small collection of visualizations 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 doing homework and other physics type stuff, I enjoy reading and watching movies which I track on my letterboxd. I’ve more recently gotten interested in baking bread and may make a dedicated page to that at some point.