About

Peter Creasey, PhD - e-mail

I'm a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California at Riverside (UCR) in the group of Prof. Laura Sales as part of the Astronomy dept.

I work on numerical simulations of galaxy formation and evolution, with interests in dark matter, hydrodynamics, collision-less dynamics and gaussian random fields. You can view my publications on Google Scholar or ADS. If you're looking to use software I've written you might want to just go to my github page.

Selected Highlights

Does Self-Interacting Dark-Matter (SIDM) help explain dwarf galaxy rotation curves?

Allowing interactions (collisions) between dark matter particles causes dark matter halos to thermalise, a process which may be important in dwarf galaxies (see paper, with coauthors from UCRs particle physics group).


How Special is the Environment of the Milky Way?

As part of Cecilia Scannapieco's group we explored how special the environment of the Milky Way is (as part of the CLUES project). See papers here and here.


Gaussian Random Fields on the sphere

Smerfs (Stochastic Markov Evaluation of Random Fields on the Sphere) is a library for creating random fields on the sphere based on this paper.

Supernovae in the interstellar medium

For my PhD thesis with Profs. Tom Theuns and R. Bower I studied explosions of supernovae (SNe) and the driving of galactic outflows and metal enrichment of the interstellar medium (ISM), simulated in the picture (from this paper).

Flying (virtual) spaceships

The folks at artificial intelligence company Moon Collider contracted me to work on the optimization and control problem of efficiently flying virtual spaceships as part of their work for the computer game Star Citizen.

Software

You can find various open-source software I have worked on on my github page. iccpy is a set of python routines for manipulating the output of cosmological simulations, created whilst working at the Institute for Computational Cosmology with Ben Lowing and John Helly. If you want to create your own cosmological initial conditions you can use lizard. Smerfs is a library for creating gaussian random fields on the sphere with a Gauss-Markov power spectrum. I'm a proponent of open science and long-time Python user and contributor to the numerical library NumPy.