Matthew Cusack

(he/him)

MPhys

Overview

I am a second-year PhD student in the School of Physics and Astronomy, supervised by Prof Paul Clark. The main focus of my project is studying star formation in extreme environments. These are envrionments with a lot of star formation activity and strong radiation fields, think starburst galaxies or the galactic centre. We think most of the stars that have ever formed did so in environments like these, so investigating how the process may differ here is critical to better understanding star formation as a whole. 

I carry out these investigations using numerical simulations of molecular clouds embedded in high radiation fields and cosmic ray ionisation rates. We run our simulations using the code AREPO, to which we have added various additional modules to simulate the full range of physics needed for this project. Below is a selection of some images from my work.