I'm an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Department of Astronomy. I am honored to be one of the first recepients of the University of Michigan's President's Postdoctoral Fellowship. I graduated from Tel Aviv University Astrophysics in 2009; the bulk of my thesis work was measuring supernova rates in clusters of galaxies as a function of redshift. Supernovae are the violent explosions of massive stars, and are responsible for all the heavy elements in the Universe. By studying the frequency of these explosions, we can say something about the history of element enrichment in their environment. The deep potential well of galaxy clusters make them a "closed box": this means that all the matter that forms in the cluster stays there and cannot escape; and since the size of galaxy clusters is thought to be representative enough of the Universe, the conclusions from my study and others that follow can inform us about the Universe in general, as well as about the physics of supernovae. After graduating, I was awarded a Kavli fellowship and was a postdoc at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. There I continued studying galaxy clusters, now using the phenomenon of gravitational lensing to map the mass distribution of the clusters. Gravitational lensing is sensitive to both the visible and the dark matter, and provides a mass estimate which is independent of assumptions on baryonic physics. My current research, at the University of Michigan, uses strong lensing clusters as cosmic telescopes. Galaxy clusters are so massive that they magnify the galaxies behind them, making galaxies that we otherwise couldn't see large and bright enough for us to study in great detail. This helps us understand processes of star formation and galaxy evolution at a time when the Universe was a small fraction of its current age. I am also engaged in research with other Astronomy faculty, to study the evolution of Milky Way -like galaxies, using data from the multi-cycle HST program CANDELS. My collaborators and I were recently granted a large HST program to image 37 clusters, and to study >70 galaxies behind them using gravitational lensing. This program will use more than 100 orbits of HST time in the next year or so. I am also using data from ground-based telescopes, mainly Magellan, but also Keck, NOT and others through my collaborators.

Short CV Publications [ ADS | astro-ph ] About FAQs Contact -- 909 Dennison University of Michigan Department of Astronomy, 500 Church St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 (734) 936 7904 E-Mail: kerens @ umich.edu