Sukanya Chakrabarti
Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
60 Garden St. , MS 51
Cambridge, MA 02138
Office: P-243
Phone: (617) 495-5374, Fax: (617) 495-7093
schakrab@cfa.harvard.edu
Welcome! I am an Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I received my Ph.d in Physics from the University of California Berkeley in 2005 where I did my thesis with Chris McKee on Spectral Energy Distributions of Embedded Protostars and Dusty Galaxies. During October 2005-October 2008, I was a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard. I am currently a UC President's Fellow at Berkeley.
I am currently working on galaxy evolution at high redshifts and present day by performing hydrodynamical and magnetohydrodynamical simulations of galaxies combined with radiative transfer calculations. I recently submitted a paper on the long-term persistence of spiral structure in galaxies. You can find the paper here.
This year, I've been working with C.K. Chan to understand magnetic instabilities, in particular, the amplification of magnetic fields above equipartition in disk galaxies. I also work with Barbara Whitney on developing numerical radiative transfer methodology. You can find our methodology paper on our code RADISHE here. I am generally interested in theoretical astrophysics, in particular on the development and application of multi-dimensional radiative transfer codes towards understanding the evolution of local and high redshift infrared bright galaxies and massive protostellar environments in our galaxy.