In 2014, Macquarie University in Australia awarded Ashkbiz Danehkar a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Physics and Astronomy in recognition of his research concerning planetary nebulae around Wolf-Rayet central stars. Since 2010, he had been a doctoral candidate at Macquarie University's Research Centre in Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Astrophotonics in Sydney, Australia. He conducted photoionization modeling, plasma diagnostics, elemental abundance analysis, and morpho-kinematic modeling of ionized nebulae during his research. For his PhD project, he also carried out integral field unit (IFU) spectroscopic observations of gaseous nebulae using the Wide-Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) on the Australian National University's (ANU) Advanced Technology 2.3-m Telescope (ATT) at Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran. To perform 3D photoionization computations, he used high-performance computing (HPC) resources on the supercomputer Vayu over 2010–2012 and Australia's first petaflop supercomputer Raijin, available in 2013, from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. An international Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (iMQRES) funded his doctoral research at Macquarie University.
Prior to the commencement of his doctorate research, the Queen's University of Belfast in the United Kingdom awarded him a Master of Science degree with Distinction (A) in Plasma Physics in 2009 in recognition of his postgraduate research on the propagation of electron-acoustic waves in a plasma containing suprathermal electrons and successfully completing the taught program on theoretical and experimental plasma physics. A postgraduate studentship from the Department for Employment and Learning (DEL) in Northern Ireland supported his studies at Queen's University Belfast. Furthermore, as of 2008, he was a visiting early-stage researcher in theoretical and mathematical physics supported by the Marie Curie Research Training Network (MRTN-CT-2004-005104) under the European Community's 6th Research Framework Programme (EU-FP6) affiliated with the University of Craiova in Romania, where his research focused on investigating the consistent interactions between dual linearized gravity (Curtright field) and a topological background field (BF) model in 1+4 dimensions. Previously, he obtained his Master of Science degree with Merit (B+) in Computational Engineering in the special field of Electrical Engineering in 2007 from the University of Rostock in Germany, where he majored in electrical engineering and computational science, and his master's project was about the development of a microcontroller-based embedded measurement system for clinical purposes.
Subsequent to completing his doctorate research, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015–2018), where he studied Chandra grating spectroscopic observations of X-ray ultra-fast outflows in active galactic nuclei through photoionization modeling and spectral data analysis. He also conducted Hubble imaging analysis of ionized nebulae and MCMC-based Bayesian statistical analysis of collisionally-ionized thermal plasma emission in the X-ray spectra of symbiotic stars. He then was a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan (2019–2021), where he conducted research on the formation of X-ray superbubbles and the ionization structures of radiatively cooling superwinds in starburst regions of star-forming dwarf galaxies using hydrodynamic simulations, along with collisional ionization and non-equilibrium photoionization calculations.
Ashkbiz Danehkar is currently a Research Scientist (Principal Investigator) at Eureka Scientific, thanks to NASA grants. His recent research includes the spin measurement of supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN), tidal disruption events (TDE), and hydrodynamic simulations aimed at the formation of Fermi γ-ray and eROSITA X-ray bubbles on both sides of the Milky Way Galaxy.
