Yueying Ni Wins McWilliams Fellowship
By Ben Panko
Physics Ph.D. candidate Yueying Ni has received the Bruce McWilliams Graduate Fellowship. The fellowship is named after Department of Physics alumnus and Carnegie Mellon University Trustee Bruce McWilliams. It provides support to a MCS graduate student studying in an area where Carnegie Mellon has a comparative advantage and where research is at an emerging or critical stage.
Ni's research in the lab of Professor of Physics Tiziana Di Matteo is particularly focused on creating cosmological hydrodynamic simulations to study the evolution of galaxies and the supermassive black holes in the early universe.
"A high redshift quasar is one of the most mysterious objects in astrophysics, playing a crucial role in the reionization epoch of the universe," Ni said. "The large volume cosmological hydrodynamic simulations I developed can help us to understand the origin and growth mechanisms of these rare objects."
In addition, Ni is also working on developing super-resolution cosmological simulations with deep learning techniques to model the evolution of the universe. "It would substantially alleviate the computational cost incurred by large cosmological simulations and help us to explore new and interesting physics in universe evolution," she said.
The McWilliams Fellowship will help Ni focus full-time on her research, she said, and allow her to explore research topics that she hopes to continue working on in her career after graduate school.