Anna-Christina Eilers
group leader
Prof. Eilers' research focuses on the formation and growth of supermassive black holes, as well as in the evolution and interplay of galaxies and quasars in the early Universe, within the first billion years of cosmic history. In particular, she aims to understand how black holes can accrete sufficient matter within very short amounts of cosmic time to grow to the billion solar mass black holes that we observe ubiquitously in the center of high-redshift quasars. She is also interested in developing new machine learning models to unravel the hidden information in large and complex data sets. Minghao Yue
postdoctoral scholar
Minghao joined MIT in the fall of 2022 as a postdoc. He is an expert in multi-wavelength observations of high-redshift quasars to characterize the properties and evolution of supermassive black holes accross cosmic time. He is particularly interested in finding gravitationally lensed quasars in the early universe, and is also working on constraining the properties of dark matter and dark energy using gravitationally lensed objects. Vidhi Lalchand
postdoctoral scholar
Vidhi is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She did her PhD in probabilistic machine learning at Christ's College, University of Cambridge in 2023. As a computational scientist she collaborates across several application domains in the contemporary sciences like physics, astronomy and computational biology. Her current research interests in astronomy include multi-modal generative models for quasar spectra and their black hole engines.
Dominika Durovcikova
graduate student
Dominika is a 4th year graduate student at MIT. She is an expert in reconstructing the continuum emission of high-redshift quasars to study the Epoch of Reionization. Her PhD will be focussed on understanding the timing and duration of the Reionization Epoch, as well as studying the growth of early supermassive black holes using spectroscopic observations and IFU data from JWST and MUSE of high-redshift quasars. Teodora Bulichi
graduate student
Teodora is a 1st year graduate student at MIT and is working both in the Computational Structure and Galaxy Formation Group as well as the Cosmic Dawn group at MIT. She is an expert in cosmological simulations and is studying the growth of supermassive black holes and the size of quasar proximity zones in the Illustris TNG and Thesan simulations. Sam Christian
undergraduate student
Sam is a junior undergraduate student at MIT. He is using multi-epoch data from NASA's WISE satellite to detect changes in the accretion rate of quasars. This infrared photometric data spans more than two decades in time and thus enables the best measurements of the time variability in distant quasars. Former group members
Karna Morey
undergraduate student
Karna was an undergraduate student at MIT. He joined the group for an undergraduate research project on the growth timescales of supermassive black holes. He studied the effective lifetime of the high-redshift quasar population, which resulted in his first publication. He was awarded a prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship based on this project. Karna is currently on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Barcelona and will afterwards move to Stanford University for his PhD.
Leah Bigwood
undergraduate student
Leah was an undergraduate student at the University of Durham. She joined the group for a research project for which she was analyzing the spectra of high-redshift quasars observed with FIRE on the Magellan Telescope. She is currently working on her PhD at the University of Cambridge.