Nianyi Chen

Postdoc Member at the IAS, Princeton, joint with MPA, Garching

I currently hold a joint postdoc position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. At the moment I work on simulating AGN feedback as well as other aspects of massive black holes together with galaxy formation, modeling the wandering massive black hole population, and understanding prospects of detecting massive black hole pairs/mergers/binaries with GW and EM observations. I am part of the Learning the Universe collaboration and the LISA astrophysics working group, where I’m coordinating the MBH merger environment project.

I did my PhD in the Physics Department at Carnegie Mellon University, co-advised by Hy Trac and Tiziana Di Matteo. My PhD research focused broadly on numerical simulations in astrophysics, mainly on topics related to galaxy formation, super-massive black hole binaries, gravitational waves, and cosmic reionization.

Before joining CMU, I graduated with an B.A. in Physics and Math from the University of Chicago, USA, where I worked with Scott Dodelson on compression algorithms for extracting maximum information from cosmic shear data in the Dark Energy Survey, and with Bradford Benson on comparing mass proxies for galaxy clusters in the South Pole Telescope.