It’s been since last June since I’ve made a post here. What have we been up to lately? Well, it’s been a busy year in the group, and I’ll highlight the year in this post.

• (June 2012) Akshaya Suresh, a Yale undergraduate, joined our group as a summer intern.  She developed an interactive OpenGL viewer for star particles in our simulations.
• (August 2012) Daegene Koh joined the group.  He will be working on the formation of globular clusters at high redshift for his PhD thesis.
• (August 2012) Kirk Barrow joined the group as an undergraduate research assistant.  He has been working on gas depletion in minihalos that result from radiative feedback.
• (August 2012) The visualization lab was completed, and we held a mini-symposium Xtreme Astrophysics as its inaugural event. See the pictures below of the visualization lab taken today.

• (September 2012) PI Wise received a 3-year NSF Astrophysics Grant!
• (September 2012) Our paper “Optimized Multi-frequency Spectra for Applications in Radiative Feedback and Cosmological Reionization” was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
• (September 2012) Mark Subbarao, Sam Skillman, Matthew Turk, and I created a visualization of the birth and death of a first star that was displayed in a new exhibit in the Adler Planetarium.
• (October 2012) Submitted two papers that focus on Dwarf Galaxies with Ionizing Radiation Feedback: (I) “Escape of Ionizing Photons” and (II) “Spatially-resolved Star Formation Relation”
• (November 2012) The 2012 Enzo Developers Workshop was organized and held at the CRA.
• (November 2012) Wise was interviewed by NHK for the Cosmic Front series.  He was featured in an episode that aired in March 2013.
• (November 2012) Our paper “The birth of a galaxy – II. The role of radiation pressure” was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
• (December 2012) Our paper “Kickstarting Reionization with the First Black Holes: The Effects of Second-order Perturbation Theory in Pre-reionization Volumes” was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
• (February 2013) Our research was featured in the 2011-2012 Highlights of XSEDE booklet that was distributed at SC12.  An accompanying visualization made its cover!
• (March 2013) Kirk Barrow was accepted into the Physics PhD program at Georgia Tech.  He will continue his research in our group as a graduate student.
• (April 2013) Our paper “The Response of Metal Rich Gas to X-ray Irradiation from a Massive Black Hole at High Redshift: Proof of Concept” was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.

Instead of going 10 months without a post and these bullet point posts, expect more frequent posts in the near future!