HITS-Yale Program in Astrophysics initiative announces first Tschira Fellows

Thu, 02/18/2016

The HITS-Yale Program in Astrophysics (HYPA) is a new initiative, sponsored by the Klaus Tschira Foundation to foster collaboration between astronomers at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) in Heidelberg and at Yale.

HYPA is jointly run by Prof. Volker Springel at HITS and Frank van den Bosch at Yale, and is initially funded for a 4-year period. This includes funding for two Tschira Postdoctoral Fellows, each of whom will spend two years at Yale and two years at HITS.

Nir Mandelker, currently finishing his PhD Thesis at Hebrew University with Prof. Avishai Dekel will start his fellowship at Yale this summer, and move to HITS in the summer of 2018. Nir is an expert in galaxy formation, and has worked on violent disk instabilities, compressivel turbulence, and instabilities in cold streams.

Freeke van de Voort, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, will start her fellowship this summer at HITS, and come to Yale in the summer of 2018. Freeke got her PhD in 2012 from the University of Leiden and is an expert in hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation.

The collaboration will also include collaboration meetings, where astronomers from HITS come to visit Yale, and vice versa.

Klaus Tschira, a co-founder of the SAP software company, founded HITS and has also funded astronomical outreach facilities such as the House of Astronomy in Heidelberg (a beautiful public outreach building shaped like M51), and the ESO Supernova Planetarium and Visitors Center in Garching b. Munich.