About Me


On Mauna Kea in Hawaii in front of the Keck and Subaru telescopes.

I'm currently a Dunlap Fellow at the Dunlap Institute at the University of Toronto. My research interest is in understanding the formation of the nuclei of galaxies - I'm currently studying the composition of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster and how these stars interact with the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center. I'm also interested in the dynamics of nearby Milky Way dwarf galaxies and how we can use them to study cosmology. I am primarily an observer, using both space-based telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, and adaptive optics on ground-based telescopes like the Keck Telescopes and Gemini to obtain precise photometry and kinematics. I have also been working on sensitivity simulations and science cases for the Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) for the future Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).

I got my undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astrophysics at UC Berkeley in 2004 and my PhD at UCLA in 2010.

For more information, please see my CV.

Contact Information:


Address:
Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics
University of Toronto
50 St. George Street
Toronto M5S 3H4, ON, Canada
email : do [at] di.utoronto.ca

Thesis

My PhD thesis is entitled: "Physical Processes in the Vicinity of a Supermassive Black Hole"