I am an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). My research uses multiwavelength space- and ground-based observations to study black hole accretion and relativistic jets, over the full range of black hole masses and accretion rates (from quiescent to super-Eddington). My main research goal is to better understand the structure/geometry of accretion flows and outflows in different accretion regimes, in order to more effectively use radiation as a probe of Galactic and extragalactic black hole populations.
Please feel free to email me, especially if you are a prospective student interested in black hole research at UNR!
Group News
May 2023 - Aarran Shaw has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at Butler University. Aarran will become an Assistant Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department, and he will eventually transition into becoming the Director of Butler's Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium. Many congratulations to Aarran! Although we will miss you and your leadership to our group, we are extremely excited for you!
May 2023 - Ava Covington was honored at UNR's "Honor the Best" ceremony for her achievement in receiving the Sam Lieberman Regents' Award for Scholarship, which is awarded to one undergraduate across the entire University for outstanding academic accomplishments, leadership ability, and service contributions. Some of Ava's academic accomplishments include her research on intermediate polars, mentored by Dr. Aarran Shaw. Congratulations on this award Ava, we are proud to have you in our group!
May 2023 - Congratulations KC Rodrigue on successfully defending your Masters Thesis in Computer Science & Engineering! KC's thesis was an interdisciplinary project with Prof. Emily Hand on new representation learning techniques applied to quasars.
April 2023 - Congratulations Latrell Harvey for leading our group's first virtual visit to Mrs. Kaelyn Porter's middle school class at White Pine Middle School in Ely, NV! This visit was the result of a year-long collaboration with UNR's NevadaTeach program's Master Teachers Megan Beckam and Glenn Waddell, Physics major Octavia Clapp, Physics professor Melodi Rodrigue, and the Great Basin National Park Foundation Executive Director Aviva O'Neil, to create and execute middle school lesson plans across Nevada centered around Nevada's Great Basin Observatory. Your lesson was a wonderful kickstart to execute the Broader Impact portion of our group's NSF-funded program on intermediate mass black holes, and the first of many more visits to Nevada schools across the state over the next years. Thank you to Mrs. Porter for welcoming us into your classroom!
April 2023 - Congratulations Michael Larsen for being chosen as a 2023 UNR College of Science Westfall Scholar, for your accomplishment of having the highest cumulative GPA amongst all Physics majors in your graduating class!
April 2023 - Congratulations to Donna DePolo and Michael Larsen for accepting offers to continue studying physics in graduate school next year! Donna will be heading to the University of Colorado Boulder, and Michael Larsen will continue at UNR!
September 2022 - Congratulations to Kurt Juarez for being selected for a Pack Research Experience Program scholarship to perform research on radio searches for intermediate mass black holes!
September 2022 - Congratulations Donna dePolo on her first paper accepted to MNRAS on The Flickering Radio Jet from the Quiescent Black Hole X-ray Binary A0620-00!
August 2022 - Congratulations to Aarran Shaw, who had a paper accepted to MNRAS on Chandra gratings spectroscopy of the outbursting X-ray binary V4641 Sgr, and also to Alexis Tudor who had the final paper of her Masters Thesis presenting Photometry+ accepted to Astronomy & Computing!
March 2022 - Congratulations Jeremiah Paul on acceptance of your paper to the Astrophysical Journal on Lyα emission from low-redshift Weak Line Quasars!
February 2022 - Congratulations to Ava Covington and her mentor Aarran Shaw on acceptance of Ava's lead author paper (as a sophomore) to the Astrophysical Journal on low-flux states in intermediate polars!
September 2021 - Congratulations to Eloisa Burton on winning a Nevada NASA Space Grant Scholarship to apply machine learning techniques to merging galaxies!
May 2021 - Donna dePolo was selected as an REU summer student at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, NM. Congratulations!
April 2021 - Many congratulations to Alexis Tudor, who was awarded the 2021 Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award for Master's students from UNR's Graduate Student Association.
April 2021 - Congratulations to Alexis Tudor for successfully defending her Masters Thesis in Computer Science & Engineering! Alexis has now publicly released Photometry+, the product of her thesis to provide a user-friendly interface for performing differential photometry with the Great Basin Observatory, the result of an interdisciplinary project in human-computer interaction with Prof. Sergiu Dascalu in CSE. Alexis also placed 3rd in the Master's category of UNR's Three Minute Thesis competition for this work!
March 2021 - Congratulations to Ava Covington for being selected as an American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) ambassador!
March 2021 - Our group had a lot of fun talking (over Zoom) about black holes with Mrs. Owens' 2nd grade class at John C. Fremont Elementary School in Carson City. What amazing questions the kids came up with. Thank you Miles Owens for setting this up, and thank you Mrs. Owens for letting us join your class!
December 2020 --- Ava Covington was awarded a Nevada Undergraduate Research Award, which includes funding for Ava to continue her research on intermediate polars during the Spring 2021 semester. Congratulations to Ava and her mentor Aarran Shaw!
October 2020 --- Alexis Tudor was awarded the 2020 Great Basin Observatory Scholarship Award. Congratulations Alexis!
September 2020 --- NASA wrote a news release on Aarran Shaw's recently published NuSTAR Legacy Survey, where he measured the masses of magnetic cataclysmic variables and showed they are more massive than non-magnetic ones (paper).
April-May 2020 --- Three of our group members, Matthew Neill, Aarran Shaw, and Alexis Tudor, gave "virutal coffee talks" on how they are using the Great Basin Observatory for their research. Check them out!
March 2020 --- Rich Plotkin contributed VLA observations to a paper in Nature Astronomy on long-lived superluminal ejecta from a black hole X-ray binary, with a story appearing in Nevada Today. This work was led by Joe Bright, a PhD student at the University of Oxford (paper).