I am a postdoctoral scholar working on various explosive transients including supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, Galactic novae, and fast blue optical transients. I use multi-wavelength follow-up observations to understand the energetics and environments of these events. I am particularly interested in looking at the radio emission that arises due to the interaction of fast-moving outflows from these transients with the surrounding medium.
I was born and raised in India, where I obtained a PhD in Astrophysics. Before joining Berkeley, I was a DST INSPIRE Faculty fellow at the Indian...
Dr. Grégoire Aufort is a postdoctoral scholar who joined UC Berkeley in October 2025. He works with Prof. Dan Weisz on spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting for the Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX) mission. Before coming to Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, where he combined cosmological simulations and large-scale galaxy surveys to study the physical properties of galaxies. Trained as a specialist in computational Bayesian statistics and galaxy evolution, his current research focuses on using deep generative models for...
Dr. Joseph R. Farah is a Miller Fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley. He was previously a Black Hole Explorer Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, and he completed his PhD at UC Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. He uses compact objects, from stellar-mass neutron stars to supermassive black holes, as laboratories for general relativity, with a focus on measuring spin. Joseph contributed to the Event Horizon Telescope’s first images of M87* and Sgr A*, and is a Deputy Science Lead for the...
Dr. Jess Howell joined Prof. Dan Weisz’s group as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley in October 2026. She received her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Edinburgh, where she studied the stellar populations of nearby dwarf galaxies to investigate their evolutionary histories. As part of the Euclid Consortium, she has led projects to identify and characterise asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars and star clusters in the Local Group and the nearby M81 Group, using these populations to probe star formation histories and the properties of their host galaxies. At Berkeley, her...
Dr. Xiaoshan Huang is a postdoctoral scholar working in the TAC group. Xiaoshan was previously working at Caltech as a Burke fellow before joining UC Berkeley. She is broadly interested in high energy astrophysics, with recent focuses on tidal disruption events and other repeating transient events in galactic center. Xiaoshan's research uses numerical simulations to understand physical processes around the black hole that drives the observed transient events, where radiation affects dynamics and thermodynamics, and also becomes the emerging observable.
