Julia Speicher, a fifth-year Ph.D. graduate student of Professor David Ballantyne, has received the competitive Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) Graduate Fellowship. As a part of Speicher’s fellowship, she will be a fully-funded resident of KITP from January to June 2024. There she will broaden her knowledge of the latest advances in astrophysics, overlapping with several long-term programs held at KITP at the University of California at Santa Barbara, under the mentorship of Prof. Omar Blaes.
Speicher studies the X-ray bursts from neutron stars, using sophisticated simulations on high-performance computing platforms. These simulations evolve the accretion disk around a neutron star, including the effects of general relativity, radiation transport, and hydrodynamics. Speicher has published three journal articles to date and has presented her work at several international conferences. Her research on X-ray bursts is essential to explain and interpret these observed extreme events and to understand the inner workings of accretion flows in a strong gravity regime near neutron stars.
