Explore my work, research, and contributions to the world of astronomy!
Hello! I am a Senior lecturer at the Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire, UK. I am generally interested in studying the formation and evolution of galaxies, particularly how supermassive black holes in the centre of galaxies affect the evolution. Specific topics include tracing and characterising multi-scale and multi-phase outflows, calculating outflow kinetic energy and coupling efficiencies, determining molecular gas content in star forming and AGN host galaxies and investigating the impact of outflows on star formation rates. I use a combination of imaging and spatially-resolved spectroscopy to study the nuclear and extended regions in nearby (low-redshift) and distant (high-redshift, including Cosmic Noon). I have extensively used data from both ground-based and space telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Very Large Telescope (VLT) and Atacama Large Millimetre-sub-mm Array (ALMA) in Chile, Keck in Hawaii (US) and Wide-Field Spectrograph (WiFes) at ANU 2.3m telescope. I am an active member of several large international collaborations such as GOALS, SUPER, BASS, 4MOST-CHANGES, COSMOS-Web, COSMOS-3D, WST and S7.
I obtained my Bachelors and Masters degree in Physics from University of Delhi and Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, respectively. Thereafter, I did my PhD in Astrophysics from Ludwig Maximilian University, whilst working at the European Southern Observatory in Garching (Munich, Germany). After my PhD, I was an ESO-fellow at the European Southern Observatory (Chile) and University of Oxford (UK) between 2017-2021 and a Prize fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (US). Thereafter, I was a CAR fellow at University of Hertfordshire (UK), before moving to a faculty position at Hertfordshire in early 2025.
During my fellowships at ESO and STScI, I also supported the operations of ground-based and space telescopes for 50% of my time, particularly the MUSE-IFU intrument and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (FUV). I have also led technical SPIE papers as a part of the HARMONI and COS instrument teams, which includes I development of new sky-subtraction methods for upcoming IFS instruments on board Extremely Large Telescopes and exploring new lifetime positions on COS FUV spectrograph.
In the field of astronomy, we generate a large amount of data that is gathered from state-of-the-art telescopes and/or simulations that model different astrophysical phenomena. As a result of the data intensive nature of projects, Astronomers develop key skills useful in the field of data science and quantitative analysis. As a faculty member, I also teach students enrolled in M.Sc. Data Science several aspects about how to do projects. These projects are highly diverse and range from predicting stock market price movements, evaluating credit default or insurance fraud probabilities, novel methods to visualise large data etc, using machine learning techniques.
The overall goal of my research programme is to search for observational evidence of AGN feedback using high-resolution multi-wavelength observations. I use a combination of imaging and spectroscopic observations from ground-based and space telescope to answer specific details on how feedback works. Here, I have highlighted a few topics that I have/am/plan to work on.
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Feel free to reach out to me via email at darshankakkad@gmail.com.