Dr. Claire Kopenhafer
Research Consultant, MSU Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research
1450 Biomedical Physical Sciences Building
Bio: Dr. Claire Kopenhafer joined the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (ICER) in 2022. Prior to this, Dr. Kopenhafer received a dual Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics and Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering from Michigan State University and was a fellow of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. She studied the evolution of galaxies across the history of the universe using large-scale multiphysics simulations.
Dr. Kopenhafer’s expertise covers all stages of simulation development, deployment, and analysis from software development and testing to analysis pipelining and data visualization. She has experience using multiple high performance computing centers supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and NASA and has developed high-performance applications in both C++ and Python.
Dr. Kopenhafer is currently collaborating closely with Prof. Brian O’Shea as a member of the FOGGIE Collaboration.
Research and technical skills:
Programming languages: C++, Python
Parallel programming with MPI and OpenMP
Data visualization and analysis workflows
Open source software development, including git workflows & testing infrastructure
Numerical methods for modeling astrophysical fluid dynamics and gravity
Selected Publications:
Kopenhafer, C., O’Shea, B.W., Voit, G.M. (2023), Seeking Self-regulating Simulations of Idealized Milky Way-like Galaxies, The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 951, Issue 2
Kopenhafer, C., Starkenburg, T.K., Tonnesen, S., Tuttle, S. (2020), The breakBRD Breakdown: Using IllustrisTNG to Track the Quenching of an Observationally Motivated Sample of Centrally Star-forming Galaxies, The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 903, Issue 2