About me

Thank you for visiting my home page! I am a computational astrophysicist.

Here you will find a description of my academic interests, links to recent papers, talks, and movies related to my research in the field of theoretical and computational astrophysics, as well as material that I use for teaching physics.

I am currently working at Hamburger Sternwarte at Universität Hamburg in Germany as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Marcus Brüggen's group.


Previously, I worked at:


I am originally from Quito, Ecuador in South America.


I did my undergraduate studies at the Physics Department of Escuela Politécnica Nacional (EPN) in my home country, and completed my PhD in 2016 at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) of the Australian National University (ANU), where I worked with Prof. Roland Crocker, Prof. Geoff Bicknell, and Prof. Christoph Federrath.

Wind-cloud simulation.

Internal structure of a filament.

Bus in a wind tunnel

(Credits go to my students at UTA: Jorge Manobanda and Omar Silva) .

My current work involves computational and analytical modelling and could be placed at the boundary between (magneto)hydrodynamics and astrophysics.


The main tools for my research are supercomputers, e.g., "SuperMUC-NG" at the Leibniz Supercomputer Centre, "Gadi" at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) in Australia, the "Hummel" HPC cluster at Universität Hamburg in Germany, and the "Cedia" cluster in Ecuador.


My current and future research interests include:


Magnetohydrodynamics: dynamical instabilities.

Astrophysical gas dynamics: winds, shocks, clouds, magnetic fields, turbulence.

Computational fluid mechanics: high-performance computing and data visualisation.

The Galactic Centre and galactic winds: thermal and non-thermal phenomenology.

Others: CFD applications for mechanical engineering and meteorology.

CONTACT:

E-mail:

wbanda@hs.uni-hamburg.de


Postal Address:

Hamburger Sternwarte

Gojenbergsweg 112

21029 Hamburg