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Laura Keating is the recipient of the 2020 Beatrice and Vincent Tremaine Fellowship

Laura’s research focuses on understanding the evolution of galaxies and the gas surrounding them. She is particularly interested in creating mock observations that can be compared directly to real data. In this way she gains intuition into the processes that drive galaxy formation.

During her time at CITA, Laura has worked on a variety of topics exploring galaxy formation from different angles.

As CITA is participating in many upcoming line intensity mapping experiments, Laura has used the suite of FIRE simulations to make predictions for galactic emission lines. By performing detailed chemical modelling of the gas in the simulated galaxies, she has made maps of the expected CO and [CII] emission.

She has also worked on modelling the contribution to the observed dispersion measure of fast radio bursts from gas in the halo of the Milky Way. By comparing results from different gas profiles, she showed that the Milky Way contribution may be lower than previously thought.

Finally, she is also interested in using quasar absorption lines to understand the reionization history of the Universe. To accomplish this, she runs radiative transfer simulations of hydrogen reionization which she compares with observations to place constraints on the temperature and ionization state of the intergalactic medium at high redshift.

Laura has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at CITA since 2017. Originally from Ireland, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge prior to joining CITA. She will leave CITA in the fall to take up a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam.

The Tremaine Fellowship is given annually in memory of Beatrice D. and Vincent J. Tremaine to honor their lifelong interest in mathematics, science and learning. The award was initially established at CITA by Vincent Tremaine in memory of his wife Beatrice when their son, Scott Tremaine, was the first director.

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