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 NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation 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.
I am currently working on galaxy evolution at high redshifts and present day by performing hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies combined with radiative transfer calculations. I work with Barbara Whitney on developing numerical radiative transfer methodology, and with Frank Shu on spiral instabilities in galactic disks. Recently, I've been working with Jiasheng Huang to understand the demographics of infrared bright galaxies locally and at high redshift, and with observers here (Giovanni Fazio, Matt Ashby, Howard Smith) to build a web interface for SED fitting and analysis that incorporates a large grid of SED models that are informed by hydrodynamical simulations using my radiative transfer code RADISHE, as well as analytic radiative transfer methods from my thesis work.
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. I also perform hydrodynamical simulations of quiescently evolving nearby galaxies to study the impact of large scale spiral structure on star formation.