One of the great features of working in the OSU Astronomy Department is that we get lots of terrific students and postdocs, and we train them in an environment that encourages them to become wide-ranging and productive researchers.

(Apologies in advance for any out-of-date information on this page, as I revise it irregularly, most recently in February 2024. Feel free to send me corrections and updates.)

Graduate Students

The students who have been my primary thesis advisees are:

J. Michael Owen, 1997
Studying Cosmological Structure Formation with Numerical Hydrodynamic Simulations
Michael began his dissertation research with Jens Villumsen and finished it with me. After graduating, he moved to a staff position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and he is still there.

Vijay Narayanan, 1999
Reconstruction Analysis of Galaxy Redshift Surveys
Vijay moved from OSU to a postdoctoral position at Princeton University. He subsequently moved to a series of industry positions on applications of data mining and artificial intelligence, including senior positions at Yahoo, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. He is presently (2024) advising startup efforts at the interface of AI and biology research.

Andreas Berlind, 2001
Biased Galaxy Formation and Large Scale Structure
Andreas held postdoctoral positions at Chicago and NYU, then became a faculty member at Vanderbilt University. He is now a program officer in the Astronomy Division of the National Science Foundation.

Zheng Zheng, 2004
Constraining Galaxy Bias and Cosmology Using Galaxy Clustering Data
Zheng held a Hubble Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and a YCAA Fellowship at Yale University. He is now a faculty member at the University of Utah.

Jeremy Tinker, 2005
Constraining Cosmology with the Halo Occupation Distribution
Jeremy held postdoctoctoral positions at Chicago and Berkeley and is now a faculty member at NYU.

Juna Kollmeier, 2006
The Intergalactic Medium: Absorption, Emission, Disruption
Juna moved from OSU to a Carnegie-Princeton/Hubble Fellowship at Carnegie Observatories and is now a permanent staff member at Carnegie and the Director of SDSS-V (SDSS = Sloan Digital Sky Survey). From 2021-2024 she was also the Director of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA).

James Pizagno, 2007
The Tully-Fisher Relation, Its Residuals, and a Comparison to Theoretical Predictions for a Broadly Selected Sample of Galaxies
Jim held postdoctoral positions at SUNY Stonybrook, UVa, University of Washington, and University of Groningen, before moving to a software engineering and database development position in Mainz, Germany.

Jaiyul Yoo, 2007
From Galaxy Clustering to Dark Matter Clustering
Jaiyul held the Menzel Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard and a Zurich-Berkeley cosmology fellowship at the University of Zurich and UC Berkeley. He is now a professor at the University of Zurich.

Guangfei Jiang, 2008
Dark and Luminous Matter in Galaxies and Large Scale Structure
Guangfei (who also earned a Masters degree in statistics at OSU) moved from OSU to a statistical analysis position in the insurance industry. She is currently a data scientist at Merkle, Inc., a marketing company.

Molly Peeples, 2010
From Galaxies to the Intergalactic Medium
Molly was in the inaugural class of postdoctoral fellows at the Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution, with a base of operations at UCLA. She moved to a postdoctoral position at the Space Telescope Science Institute and is now a tenured Astronomer at STScI.

Chris Orban, 2011
Powerlaws, Bumps and Wiggles: Self-similar Models in the Era of Precision Cosmology
After completing his PhD in the OSU Physics Department, Chris took a postdoctoral position in the high energy density laser physics group at OSU, while maintaining close connections to astrophysics and teaching courses at OSU and elsewhere. He is now an Assistant Professor of Physics at the OSU Marion campus.

Vimal Simha, 2011
Dark Matter Substructures and Galaxy Assembly
Vimal moved from OSU to postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University followed by the University of Cape Town and the University of Edinburgh. He is now pursuing a career in science journalism.

Jonathan Bird, 2012
The Formation and Evolution of Disk Galaxies
Jon was a VIDA Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University, and he has remained at Vanderbilt as a Research Scientst.

Ying Zu, 2013
Cross Correlation Cluster Cosmology
Ying was a postdoctoral researcher with Rachel Mandelbaum in the McWilliams Center for Cosmology at Carnegie Mellon University and returned to Ohio State for a year as a CCAPP Postdoctoral Fellow. He is now a faculty member at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Brett Andrews, 2014
Modeling Galactic Chemical Evolution
Brett moved to a a postdoctoral research position at the University of Pittsburgh, working primarily on the SDSS-IV MaNGA survey. He is now a Research Scientist at U. Pittsburgh.

Joe McEwen, 2016
The Hidden Universe: Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Baryons
Joe is a data scientist in Seattle and teaches at North Seattle College.

Ben Wibking, 2019
Cosmic Structure Formation on Small Scales: From Non-Linear Galaxy Clustering to the Interstellar Medium
Ben did his first postdoc at Australian National University and is now a postdoc at Michigan State University.

Suk Sien Tie, 2020
Lyman-alpha forest cosmology with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)
Suk Sien, whom I co-advised with Paul Martini, is a postdoctoral researcher at U.C. Santa Barbara.

Andres Salcedo, 2021
Cosmology with cluster-galaxy cross-correlations and topics in assembly bias
Andres is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona.

Emily Griffith, 2022
Stellar Abundance Ratios in the Milky Way and their Implications for Nucleosynthesis
Emily is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado.

James Johnson, 2023
From Dwarfs to Spirals: Chemical Evolution of Galaxies across Stellar Mass and the Implications for Nucleosynthesis
James is a Carnegie Theory Fellow at Carnegie Observatories.

Postdocs

I have also been fortunate to work with a number of excellent postdocs at Ohio State, some of them supported by my grants, two by Hubble Fellowships, and others supported by other faculty or by OSU's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. While it is generally unambiguous who your thesis advisees are, the boundary for postdoctoral advisees is more fuzzy. Postdocs I have collaborated with and (I hope) mentored at Ohio State are, in chronological order:

Rupert Croft,
now on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University.

James Bullock,
now the Dean of Physical Sciences at U.C. Irvine.

Andrey Kravtsov
(Hubble Fellow), now on the faculty at University of Chicago.

Xuelei Chen,
now a Professor and leader of the Cosmic Dark Energy and Dark Matter research group at the National Astronomical Observatories of China, in Beijing.

Oleg Gnedin,
now a faculty member at the University of Michigan.

Francesco Shankar,
now a faculty member in the Astronomy Group at the University of Southampton.

Eduardo Rozo
(CCAPP Fellow), now a faculty member in the Physics Department at the University of Arizona.

Matthew Pieri,
now an Excellence Chair at Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseilles.

Stelios Kazantzidis
(CCAPP Fellow), now a faculty member in Physics at the University of Athens.

Michael Mortonson
(CCAPP Fellow), now working in the data science industry in the Bay Area.

Ralph Schoenrich
(Hubble Fellow), now a faculty member in Physics at University College London.

Ying Zu
(CCAPP Fellow), now a faculty member at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU).

Hao-Yi (Heidi) Wu
(CCAPP Fellow), now a faculty member at Boise State University.

Fiorenzo Vincenzo
(CCAPP Fellow), now a faculty member at the University of Hull.