SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Showing 1-20 of 1,954 Results
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Tom Abel
Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics and of Physics
BioWhat were the first objects that formed in the Universe? Prof. Abel's group explores the first billion years of cosmic history using ab initio supercomputer calculations. He has shown from first principles that the very first luminous objects are very massive stars and has developed novel numerical algorithms using adaptive-mesh-refinement simulations that capture over 14 orders of magnitude in length and time scales. He currently continues his work on the first stars and first galaxies and their role in chemical enrichment and cosmological reionization. His group studies any of the first objects to form in the universe: first stars, first supernovae, first HII regions, first magnetic fields, first heavy elements, and so on. Most recently he is pioneering novel numerical algorithms to study collisionless fluids such as dark matter which makes up most of the mass in the Universe as well as astrophysical and terrestrial plasmas. He was the director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and Division Director at SLAC 2013-2018.
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Frank Abild-Pedersen
Senior Scientist, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
BioDr. Abild-Pedersen is the co-director of SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis. He is leading a research team that focuses on developing an understanding of the factors determining the catalytic properties at the interface between gas/solvent and solid surfaces and to apply these insights to processes and catalysts of importance for energy transformations and for sustainable chemical production. His research takes advantage of computer facilities at SLAC and Stanford to gain the necessary understanding and to link these simulations to experiments where new catalyst synthesis methods are developed, and the catalyst materials are characterized both in terms of performance (activity, selectivity, durability, etc.) and in terms of geometrical and electronic structure. The underlying philosophy of his research is that by having a fundamental understanding of the way surfaces catalyze a chemical reaction we can make a quantum leap in our ability to make predictions for new catalysts and processes. This requires the development of a theory of heterogeneous catalysis, including electrocatalysis, based on computational and experimental results.
Dr Abild-Pedersen has extensive experience with simulations and modeling of chemical reactions. His work began with the derivation of energy correlations in catalysis that have helped speed up screening for active, selective and stable catalysts for energy conversion as a graduate student working with Professor Jens K. Nørskov at the Technical University of Denmark. He moved to SLAC in 2010 as a staff scientist and helped build up SUNCAT and define research directions in the field of heterogeneous catalysis. -
Zeeshan Ahmed
Lead Scientist, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
BioI am an observational cosmologist, and an experimental physicist. I build ultra-low-noise detectors using superconducting and quantum sensing techniques, and use them in experiments and instrumentation for cosmology. I currently spend most of my time investigating the inflation paradigm of standard cosmology, using the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Recently, I've become interested in using the weak lensing of the CMB in conjunction with galaxy surveys to study the growth of large-scale structure in the universe.
I received my PhD in particle astrophysics from Caltech in 2012, working on direct detection of WIMP dark matter with the CDMS-II experiment. I then shifted my effort to searching for inflation with the CMB. I was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford through 2015 before being appointed as a Wolfgang Panofsky Fellow at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2017, I won a DOE Office of Science Early Career Award to work on new signal transduction and superconducting multiplexing techniques for next-generation CMB cameras. I am currently appointed as a Lead Scientist at SLAC, where I am CMB department head. I also serve as scientific project manager for the bring up of SLAC's Detector Microfabrication facility for the development of superconducting and quantum sensors and devices.
