We congratulate Dylan Nelson, who heads an Emmy Noether Research Group at the Centre for Astronomy of Heidelberg University (ZAH), for being awarded the Hector Research Career Development Award. The award is endowed with 25,000 euros and, besides the funding, includes additional money for the establishment of a doctoral position. The Hector Foundation hereby follows the goal of supporting outstanding young researchers on their way towards a professorship.
Dylan Nelson studied at the University of California in Berkeley and at Harvard University (both USA). After earning his doctorate in 2015, he became a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching near Munich. Since 2020 he has directed the Emmy Noether research group “Computational Galaxy Formation and Evolution”, which explores the origins and development of galaxies with computer support. “We want to understand how gas flows in, out of and around galaxies,” underlines the astrophysicist. In order to understand the evolution of cosmic structures over time, Dr Nelson’s research group is developing numerical simulations. “With the funds from the Award and the additional doctoral position, we can explore new simulation techniques and applications of current machine learning methods,” says Dylan Nelson.
