ABOUT ME

I obtained my Ph.D. in Astronomy in June 2014, at the University of Cape Town, under the general guidance of Prof. W. J. G. de Blok. The thesis title was "Interstellar medium properties and star formation in nearby galaxies". My thesis received an A rating from all three external examiners. My subsequent peer-reviewed papers have been valuable for theoretical models that assess the role and origin of turbulence in the interstellar medium. The thesis made use of high-resolution interferometric observations of neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) gas in nearby galaxies to measure with high precision fundamental parameters, relevant for star formation studies. I achieved this robust measurement by reducing the effects of noise using a spectral-line stacking technique.

After my Ph.D., I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of South Africa. There I continued my research on HI observations of nearby galaxies, focusing on the morphological and the radial dependence of the HI line widths. Together with international collaborators, I also worked on similar research topics, involving a comparative study of HI versus carbon-monoxide (CO) line widths. The resulting papers have also received a number of citations, especially from studies of the physics of star formation. After receiving funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, I went to Germany for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). This gave me the opportunity to work with a vibrant research group led by Dr. Fabian Walter. Through this fellowship, I focused on two main projects. One is analyzing how possible systematic effects during image reconstruction process affect the shapes of the resulting HI velocity profiles. The second one is to develop a new stacking technique to detect faint HI emissions at the outer disks of nearby galaxies.

After spending time at MPIA, I went back to South Africa as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Radio Astronomy Techniques and Technologies (RATT), Rhodes University, working with a group led by Prof. Oleg Smirnov. I have since been heavily involved in HI science with MeerKAT. I have so far led two successful MeerkAT proposals. One is titled "A Search For Diffuse HI Emission In The Nearby Dwarf Irregular Galaxy WLM and IC 1613". At the time of observations, the dwarf galaxy IC 1613 was too close to the sun and was not observed. The aim was to make detailed 3D modeling of the HI morphologies and kinematics of the galaxy to search for signs of gas accretion. The second successful MeerKAT project which I led was titled "Mapping the starburst galaxy NGC 4945 with MeerKAT-64". The aim of this project is to map the extended HI disk and radio continuum emission in NGC 4945. The scientific goal is to study the interplay between gas and star formation in a chaotic environment such as the interstellar medium of NGC 4945.

Now, I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía - CSIC, Granada, Spain, part of a team led by Dr. Lourdes Verdes-Montenegro. I am involved in a research on the lifecycle of gas in galaxy groups. Particularly, I am analysing recently obtained MeerKAT HI data of the Hickson Compact Groups. I aim to investigate the link between star formation and gas removal in Hickson Compact Groups. In addition by means of kinematic modelling, I aim to separate intra-group gas from galaxy gas.