Postdoctoral Fellowship: AAPF: Near-field Cosmology with 6D Stellar Streams

Nora Shipp is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at Carnegie Mellon University. Shipp will use observations and simulations of stellar streams orbiting the Milky Way to understand properties of dark matter and the physics of galaxy formation. For the educational component of this project, Shipp will establish training and volunteer opportunities in data science for social good for astronomers and physicists with data science expertise. This research project will establish robust predictions for populations of stellar streams around the Milky Way and beyond, using a variety of cosmological simulations and semi-analytic models. Shipp will then use large astronomical surveys, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to test these predictions and to map the local distribution of dark matter, inform our models of small-scale galaxy formation, and measure the structure and assembly history of the Milky Way. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.