About Me

Welcome to my homepage. I am a theoretical astrophysicist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Alabama (UA).  I joined the UA faculty in August 2022.

I am especially interested in how planets were assembled from their natal circumstellar disks, a.k.a. protoplanetary disks, to form our Solar System and thousands of extrasolar planetary systems detected in the past couple of decades.  I specialize in magneto-hydrodynamics and dust-gas dynamics of protoplanetary disks and the formation of kilometer-sized planetary objects such as asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects in the Solar System.  My other research interests include galactic dynamics and the interstellar medium.
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My investigation usually involves large-scale computer simulations on high-end computing facilities, such as those in NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division, and the ensuing data analysis.  I am a developer for two major simulation codes, Athena++ and the Pencil Code, which are publicly available and widely used in astrophysics.

I am one of the principal investigators in the PFITS+ collaboration, involving six institutions and nearly 20 members.