Title: Solving the Mysteries of Galaxy and Supermassive Black Hole Formation in the Era of High-resolution Simulations and Machine Learning 

Speaker: Ji-hoon Kim 

Abstract: The community of numerical galaxy formation has benefited greatly from the ever-improving computing technology over the past decades.  I will discuss the new possibilities in the upcoming era of high-resolution numerical galaxy formation and machine learning, and highlight efforts to overcome the accompanying challenges.  As one example, I will describe a state-of-the-art cosmological simulation of a high-redshift quasar-host galaxy that includes sophisticated treatments of feedback from star-forming clumps and supermassive black holes (SMBHs).  I will demonstrate that previously undiscussed types of interplay between galactic components may hold important clues about the growth of SMBHs.  In another example, I will introduce a machine-assisted pipeline that estimates baryonic properties of a galaxy based purely on its dark matter (DM) properties in a large-scale DM-only simulation. 

BIO:
Ji-hoon Kim is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Seoul National University studying computational cosmology, with a focus on galaxy and massive black hole formation using high-resolution simulation codes.  He has also been coordinating a large inter-institutional cosmological simulations comparison project called AGORA.  He was formerly a research associate and a NASA Einstein Fellow at KIPAC/Stanford, and a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and UC Santa Cruz.  Before that, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Physics at Stanford University.