Biography
Alan Calder is a professor in the Astronomy Group within the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and a core faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. His research is in nuclear astrophysics and involves simulating explosive astrophysical phenomena, with extensive use of large-scale computing.
Before Stony Brook he held research appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and at the University of Chicago, where he worked at the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes. He also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Research
His research centres on Type Ia supernovae, the bright stellar explosions that produce and disperse heavy elements and therefore shape galactic chemical evolution. Because their light curves can be standardised, these events also serve as distance indicators in studies of the expansion history of the universe.
He runs detailed simulations to explore how factors such as the age and composition of the progenitor affect an event's brightness. Understanding these systematic effects matters for the intrinsic scatter of Type Ia supernovae, which remains a significant source of uncertainty in cosmological studies.