CAREER: RACING -- Resolving the Activity Cycle In the Nearest Galaxies

Principal Investigator (PI) Mills and her team will investigate how super-massive black holes are fed and how stars form in the innermost regions of nearby galaxies. The team will map the cold gas and dust using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Array (VLA) telescopes. To ensure broader participation and inclusion of underrepresented minority (URM) undergraduate students the PI will establish the RAISE (Remote Astronomy Internship and Scholarship Experience) Fellowship program. Students will participate in a remote summer research group project and will be mentored throughout their senior year to ensure a smooth transition to a PhD program. Using a combination of data from ALMA, the VLA, and the James Webb Space Telescope the team will characterize, at the parsec-scale, which physical properties of a galaxy’s central gas and dust reservoir are correlated with central star formation and black hole activity to advance our understanding of the duty cycles of low-luminosity active galactic nuclei and central starbursts. 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.