Office Hours

By appointment

Education

PhD, University of Toronto, 2009

Affiliations

Research Groups

Research Interests

Dr. Nair is a multi-wavelength observational astronomer investigating the formation and evolution of galaxies. Her interests are in visual and quantitative galaxy morphologies, the relative role of merging and secular processes, specifically bars, rings and spiral arms, in the star formation, and accreting supermassive black holes or AGN. Dr. Nair is particularly interested in data mining large surveys to explore how galaxies have evolved over time. She is currently involved in the SDSS IV MaNGA survey which will obtain resolved spectroscopic observations of 10,000 nearby galaxies to investigate their star formation and mass building history.

Dr. Nair received her doctoral degree from the University of Toronto in 2009. She joined the faculty of The University of Alabama in January 2014.

Current Research Group Members

Graduate Students

– Nirmal Baral
Topic: Improving automated classifications of visual galaxy morphologies

– Wenhao Li
Topic: X-ray/Optical properties of merging galaxies

– Kavya Mukundan
Topic: X-ray/Optical properties of barred galaxies

Undergraduate Students
– Isabella Dugas — X-ray/Optical properties of dual merging galaxies

Openings may be available for graduate students or undergraduate students to start in Fall 2020. Please email me (pnair@ua.edu) to set up an appointment to discuss potential projects.

Former Group Members

-Dr. Amy Jones (postdoc)  — Now staff scientist at STScI.

Graduate Students

– Dr. Chris Spradlin – PhD from UAB  — Primary supervisor Jimmy Irwin (UA).
– Sunil Laudari — M.S. from UA

Undergraduate Students

– Amber Greybeal
– Tyler Evans
– Jacob Curtis
– Jake Powell
– Jeremy Cummings
– Emily Frank
– Ben Runge
– Jacob Winton
– Alex Drozd
– Carlisle Wishard — current PhD student at Purdue, Dept. of Planetary Sciences
– John Andrews
– Alex Hoffman