Charlie Conroy Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University

About

Charlie Conroy
I am a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and a senior member of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA). In 2013 I was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering and in 2017 I was awarded the Helen B. Warner Prize from the AAS. My research group studies a broad range of topics in the fields of dark matter, galaxy formation, stellar evolution, and stellar populations using both observational and theoretical tools.

Current Research Areas

Dark Matter

We map the distribution of dark matter throughout the cosmos, including within the Milky Way galaxy. We are co-leading the Via Project, a new survey of the sky to detect and study the smallest dark matter structures with the ultimate goal of constarining the nature of dark matter. In previous projects, we determined the relation between galaxies and dark matter, identified a dark matter "wake" trailing the LMC galaxy, and revealed the "tilted" distribution of dark matter within our Galaxy.

Galaxy Formation

We investigate the formation and evolution of galaxies over cosmic time, from the earliest epochs to the present. We use a wide array of resources, including the James Webb and Hubble Space telescopes, large ground-based telescopes (including the 6.5m Magellan and the MMT telescopes) and large computing resources to simulate these processes. We have recently completed a large spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way - the H3 Survey - that traced the assembly history of the Milky Way over most of its history. In previous work, we explored the mechanisms responsible for galaxy growth and quenching at z=2 through the BlueJay Survey with JWST.

Stars & Stellar Populations

We develop models of stars and stellar populations and use them to unravel the properties of star clusters and galaxies. We lead the development of the MIST stellar evolution database, the C3K synthetic stellar spectral library, the Flexible Stellar Population Synthesis (FSPS) program, as well as the Prospector stellar population inference engine. We have used these tools to measure precise ages for thousands of stars in the Galaxy, to determine the star formation histories for thousands of galaxies, and to constrain the stellar IMF within and among nearby galaxies.

Research Group

Current Members

Former Members

  • Dan Weisz (Associate Professor, UC Berkeley)
  • Yuan-Sen Ting (Associate Professor, OSU)
  • Phil Rosenfield (Microsoft Research)
  • Jieun Choi (Senior Applied ML Scientist, Netflix)
  • Ben Cook (Quantitative Researcher, Walleye Capital)
  • Meng Gu (Assistant Professor, Hong Kong University)
  • Josh Speagle (Assistant Professor, University of Toronto)
  • Alexa Villaume (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo)
  • Joel Leja (Assistant Professor, Penn State University)
  • Aaron Dotter (Research Associate Professor, Dartmouth College)
  • Ana Bonaca (Staff Scientist, Carnegie Observatories)
  • Ivan Cabrera-Ziri (Data Scientist, Vyoma)
  • Sandro Tacchella (Assistant Professor, Cambridge University)
  • Seth Gossage (CIERA Fellow, Northwestern University)
  • Harshil Kamdar (Senior Scientist, Kairos Aerospace)
  • Sirio Belli (Assistant Professor, University of Bologna)
  • Rohan Naidu (Pappalardo & Hubble Fellow, MIT)
  • Lieke van Son (Assistant Professor, Radboud University)
  • Kareem El-Badry (Assistant Professor, Caltech)
  • Jesse Han (Stanford Science Fellow, Stanford)
  • MJ Park (Kavli Fellow, Cambridge University)

Contact

Office:
Center for Astrophysics, P-320
60 Garden St
Cambridge, MA, 02140

Email:
cconroy@cfa.harvard.edu

Prospective Students:

I will be happy to discuss research opportunities if you are admitted to our program, but I receive too many pre-admissions inquiries and cannot respond to them individually.