Drake Miller

My name is Drake Miller, and I am a first-year graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. My primary research interests involve theoretical studies of high-energy astrophysics. More specifically, I am interested in black holes and their environments, accretion flows, galaxy clusters and the intracluster medium (ICM), and more. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, I used computational resources to study the development of plasma instabilities in the ICM of galaxy clusters with particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations, and then connected their effects to overall ICM plasma heating. I also completed an observational project that resulted in the production of a Legacy catalog that contains derived physical quantities of ~1.7 million galaxies from the eBOSS and DECaLS surveys.

Scholastic Achievements

• B.S. in Physics, Astronomy-Physics, and Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison

  • Honors in the major: Astronomy-Physics (Honors thesis titled “Observational Analysis of the Physical Properties of eBOSS and DECaLS galaxies using CIGALE”)

• Hagengruber Scholarship Award (https://www.physics.wisc.edu/department/awards/apply/, UW-Madison 2022)

Publications

“A Heating Mechanism via Magnetic Pumping in the Intracluster Medium” (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.00019.pdf)