Specialty Areas

Supernovae, Cosmology, Computational Astrophysics, Optical and Spectroscopic Surveys

Research Interests

My primary research areas involve computational astrophysics. I am always looking to solve new and interesting problems in the best and fastest way possible using my background in high-performance computing and astrophysics. I am the PI of the Type Ia Supernova program in the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) as well as a member of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and I am actively involved in carrying out spectrum synthesis calculations for supernovae for the former. I am also a member of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey experiment (DESI). Due to this involvement, I have recently turned my attention to working on a new code, NYX, to perform large adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamical + n-body simulations to calculate the absorption spectra caused by neutral hydrogen in the cosmological environment - a Lyman alpha forest cosmology simulator.

Biography

Nugent received B.A. from Bowdoin College in 1990 followed by a MS and PhD in Physics from the University of Oklahoma in 1997. Nugent came to Berkeley in 1996 to work with Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology Project in the Physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the group made the first measurements of the accelerating universe. He then moved to the Computational Research Division in 2000 and subsequently co-founded the Computational Cosmology Center in 2010. That same year he became a Senior Staff Scientist at LBL and an Adjunct Professor in the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley. He is currently the Division Deputy for Scientific Engagement in LBL's Computational Research Division.

Projects

Publications

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