Dr. Maryam Modjaz

Welcome! I am a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in Astronomy at UC Berkeley . My research consists of understanding the explosive deaths of massive stars: Type Ib/c Supernovae (SN Ib/c), Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs), and the SN-GRB connection. I also study these stellar explosions' host environments, in particular their metallicities, as a promising new tool for understanding their progenitors and the explosion conditions that determine the fate of massive stars.

I collaborate with Prof. Alex Filippenko and Prof. Josh Bloom, and their respective groups. In 2007, I completed my PhD at Harvard University Department of Astronomy, working with Prof. Bob Kirshner. I was awarded the Fireman Prize from the Harvard Astronomy Department for outstanding dissertation work. For my PhD thesis, I studied the explosions of massive stars in order to comprehensively characterize the class of stripped-envelope supernovae due to core-collapse and to illuminate the SN-GRB connection. At the CfA, I was part of the Supernova Group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I am also a member of the SWIFT SN Team and of the SN Science Collaboration with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

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Research Interests: Supernovae, SN-GRB Connection, Environments of SN and GRBs