Graduate Students

Esfandiar Alizadeh

email Esfandiar

office 241 Loomis
p. 217.333.2807

Esfandiar received his bachelors and masters degrees in physics from Sharif university of technology, Tehran. Then he headed to UIUC to pursue his PHD in cosmology under supervision of Dr. Benjamin Wandelt. His current research involves structure formation and dark matter halos.

Charmaine Armitage

email Charmaine | Personal Website

office 241 Loomis
p. 217.333.2807

Charmaine Armitage is a graduate student in Physics. She works on techniques for assessing and removing beam systematics for up-coming CMB missions and is involved with the Planck satellite collaboration. Removal of beam distortions will be critical to the accurate measurement of the CMB polarization signal and the detection of inflation-validating B-modes. Charmaine is also developing methods to search for structure and anomalies in astrophysical signals. More information and links to papers and presentations can be found on her website.

Rahul Biswas

email Rahul

office 267 Loomis
p. 217.244.6742

Rahul Biswas is a graduate student in the Wandelt Research group working on estimation of cosmological parameters in order to study the nature of dark energy.

Research interests: Cosmological Parameter Estimation, Models of Dark Energy, Supernova Cosmology

Chad Fendt

email Chad

office 267 Loomis
p. 217.244.6742

Chad Fendt graduated from the University of Central Arkansas in 2003 with a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics. In August of 2003 he moved to Illinois in order to begin graduate work and joined Ben's cosmology group the following year. Currently Chad is pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics. His research interests include CMB cosmology and applying numerical techniques to studying large cosmological data sets. Chad also helps develop applications for use in Cosmology@Home.

Rishi Khatri

email Rishi

office 132 Astronomy Building
p. 217.244.5469

Rishi graduated from Panjab University, Chandigarh (India) with a BE in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering in 2000. He worked at Texas Instruments, Bangalore (India) as a design engineer from 2000-2004 before he finally saw the light and joined the graduate program at Department of Astronomy, UIUC in August of 2004.

Research Interests: Physical cosmology, CMB, 21 cm Radiation, Early Universe, Fundamental Constants.

Amit Yadav

email Amit

office 128 Astronomy Building
p. 217.333.9343

Amit Yadav is interested in understanding the laws of nature and how they manifest themselves in the evolution of the universe (and in eventually forming things such as life). After exploring a few areas of physics and astronomy, Amit decided to focus his research in theoretical cosmology. Currently, he and Ben are studying the early universe (inflation, cyclic model, etc) using the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization information.