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Tiziana Di Matteo - Department of Physics

Tiziana Di Matteo

Professor, Department of Physics

Tiziana Di Matteo's research focuses on the study of black holes, encompassing a wide range of topics in high energy astrophysics.

Expertise

Topics:  High Energy Astrophysics, Cosmology, Space, Astrophysics, Black Holes

Industries: Research, Education/Learning

Tiziana Di Matteo's research focuses on the study of black holes, encompassing a wide range of topics in both high energy astrophysics and cosmology. They include theoretical studies of the interplay between black hole growth and galaxy formation and investigations of various aspects of the physics of accretion disks around black holes.

Media Experience

ASTRID traces 13.5 billion years of black hole and galaxy evolution  — Phys.org
"We have this very large simulation and piece of the universe, which captures the growth of black holes from the time at which they were formed all the way to today, as well as the galaxies that form, also from a very early time," said study co-author and ASTRID principal investigator Tiziana Di Matteo, professor of physics and director of CMU's McWilliams Center for Cosmology & Astrophysics.

Hubble Finds Double Quasar in Early Universe  — Carnegie Mellon University News
“Understanding how black holes form, the first quasars emerge and how they grow along our cosmic histories is one of the greatest theoretical and observational challenges of modern astrophysics,” said Tiziana Di Matteo(opens in new window), professor of physics and director of Carnegie Mellon’s McWilliams Center for Cosmology(opens in new window).

Machine learning accelerates cosmological simulations  — EurekAlert!
Carnegie Mellon University Physics Professors Tiziana Di Matteo and Rupert Croft, Flatiron Institute Research Fellow Yin Li, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. candidate Yueying Ni, University of California Riverside Professor of Physics and Astronomy Simeon Bird and University of California Berkeley's Yu Feng surmounted this problem by teaching a machine learning algorithm based on neural networks to upgrade a simulation from low resolution to super resolution.

A taste of James Webb’s potential  — Cosmos
To determine what Webb is expected to see, the team then used a state-of-the-art computer simulation called BlueTides, developed by a team led by Tiziana Di Matteo from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, US.

Simulation showing Milky Way-esque galaxy in early universe could prove cold dark matter theory  — IBTimes
Tiziana Di Matteo, professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon, said: "It's awe inspiring to think that galaxies much like our own existed when the universe was so young. The deepest Hubble Space Telescope observations have thus far only covered small volumes of space and have found very irregular, clumpy galaxies at these early epochs.

Milky Way-like galaxies may have existed in the early universe  — Phys.org
"It's awe inspiring to think that galaxies much like our own existed when the universe was so young," said Tiziana Di Matteo, professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon. "The deepest Hubble Space Telescope observations have thus only covered small volumes of space and have found very irregular, clumpy galaxies at these early epochs. It is not surprising that in these small volumes some of the small galaxies do not have regular morphologies like large disk galaxies. Similarly, numerical simulations have been limited in size so they have only made predictions for the smaller, clumpier galaxies at these early times."

Education

Ph.D., Astrophysics, University of Cambridge
B.Sc., Astrophysics, University College London

Spotlights

Accomplishments

Carnegie Science Award of Excellence (2008)

Royal Astronomical Society Michael Penston Prize (1999)

Affiliations

American Physical Society : Fellow

LSST Dark Energy Sciente Collaboration, Cosmological Simulation Task Force : Member

NSF XSEDE Resource Allocation Committee : Member

Carnegie Science Center Awards of Excellence Committee : Member

Links

Articles

The ASTRID Simulation at z = 0: From Massive Black Holes to Large-scale Structure  —  The Astrophysical Journal (2026)

Heavy Seeds and the First Black Holes: Insights from the BRAHMA Simulations  —  The Astrophysical Journal (2026)

Orbital and radiative properties of wandering intermediate-mass black holes in the ASTRID simulation  —  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Overmassive central black holes in the cosmological simulations ASTRID and Illustris TNG50  —  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Statistics of Galactic-scale Quasar Pairs at Cosmic Noon  —  The Astrophysical Journal

Concordance between Observations and Simulations in the Evolution of the Mass Relation between Supermassive Black Holes and Their Host Galaxies  —  The Astrophysical Journal

Unveiling the first seeds of supermassive black holes using cosmological simulations  —  Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Photos

Videos