Michael Williams

williams@astro.ox.ac.uk

Home address: Sub-department of Astrophysics, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH, UK

Visiting ESO Garching during 2009/10: +49 89 3200 6857, Room 506, Karl-Schwarzschild-Straße 2, D-85748 Garching bei München, Germany

Travel

Research

NEW on 2009.01.10: Publications and talks

I am doing a PhD under the supervision of Martin Bureau at Oxford. I am spending the year 2009-2010 at ESO HQ working with Harald Kuntschner.

I study galaxy evolution using both observational data and theoretical models. I have constrained the dark and stellar mass content of a sample of early-type (S0–Sb) disk galaxies (arXiv:0909.0680), and the evolutionary relationship between S0s and spirals using the Tully-Fisher relation (in preparation, see abstract). I am now examining the stellar populations of my sample, looking at evidence for secular evolution and gas shocking in absorption and emission lines, and constraining the IMF by comparing the results of up-to-date stellar population models to dynamical models which attempt to correctly account for dark matter.

I am a member of Sub-department of Astrophysics and St Anne’s College in Oxford, and I hold an ESO Studentship in Garching.

Computing

Notes on the computing with OS X:

I wrote a short textbook introduction to procedural programming in Python for undergradautes during my Masters project (also available under the ‘Physics’ link on the Python.org homepage).

Teaching

From 2006 to 2009 I taught the thermal physics paper to second year undergraduates at St Anne’s, where I was a Graduate Development Scholar. I wrote revision guides for the Kinetic Theory and Thermodynamics components of the course. Statistical mechanics is left as an exercise for the reader. For full notes see Steve Blundell’s page.

Other

Following an interview with Guillermo Martínez, I wrote a feature about science in literary fiction. I do film and music stuff in my spare time.