The Department of Astronomy welcomes Dr. Caleb Choban, our inaugural Sullivan Prize Postdoctoral Fellow. Caleb comes to us from the University of California at San Diego, where he earned his Ph.D. in Physics studying the life cycle and evolution of interstellar dust within galaxies and its effects on and interactions with the interstellar medium. He develops dust evolution models integrated into cosmological zoom-in simulations as part of the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project and compares their results with indirect and direct dust observations.
At San Diego, Caleb worked with Prof. Dušan Kereš and Prof. Karin Sandstrom. At IU, Caleb will continue his work on interstellar dust, first incorporating dust particle size distributions into his model, and then use the model to simulate dust grain evolution in giant molecular clouds. Dust grain sizes are important because they determine the effective extinction law.
The Sullivan Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship is funded by an endowment to support graduate and postdoctoral research in astronomy at Indiana University Bloomington. We expect to award a Fellowship each academic year for a three year term. We are honored by the gift to our department and excited by the opportunity to bring outstanding early career astronomers to Bloomington.
The College of Arts