RANA EZZEDDINE

RANA EZZEDDINE

ABOUT ME

I am an assistant professor and Astrophysicst at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. My reasearch group and I are studying the chemical signatures of stars individually and collectively to interpret the origin and evolution of chemical elements, and investigate the formation and history of the early Milky Way Galaxy.

I'm originally from Beirut, Lebanon but have lived on three continents. I grew up in Zurich, Switzerland. I was the first to recieve a joint Master degree in Astrophsycis at Notre Dame University and Université de Saint Joseph in Lebanon. I recieved my PhD degree from the Université de Montpellier in France. After that, I was a JINA-CEE Postdoctoral Fellow, and Heising-Simons Fellow at the Kavli Space Science Center at MIT. As of January 2020, I became faculty at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florida.

PhD (2012-2015): Université de Montpellier/LUPM

Postdoc (2016-2019): MIT/Kavli Space Science Center

Faculty (2020-present): University of Florida/Astronomy Department

E-mail: rezzeddine@ufl.edu

Research Interests

My scientific research spans a broad range of observational and theoretical topics in modern stellar astrophysics, from numerical modelling and physics of radiative transfer in stellar atmospheres to quantitative spectroscopy, detailed studies of chemical and dynamical structure of the Milky Way and early star forming galaxies.

My group and I study nearby stars and galaxies to understand the origin elements and the history of our Galaxy. I am particularly interested in high precision spectroscopy. My group and I develop open source computational models and pipelines to enable fast and reliable high precision spectroscopic characterization of stars, using physically motivated Non-LTE models.

I am a core member of the R-process Alliance (RPA) collaboration, and the JINA_CEE and IRENA collaborations. I am also a member of the "Chemical nucleosynthesis" and "Exoplanets and stellar astrophysics" science working groups of the next generation Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) Telescope.

Recent Research Projects

Research Group

Our research group at UF are investigating theoretical and numerical modelling of radiative calculations in stellar atmospheres, as well as observations to accurately characterize the chemical compositions of the oldest, most chemically interesting metal-poor stars in the Galaxy and nearby satellite dwarf galaxies to draw connections to the yields of enrichment events that took place in the early universe.

Avrajit Bandyopadhyay

Postdoctoral Scholar

Expertise: Spectroscopy, r-process abundances, Globular Clusters.

Shivani Shah

Graduate Student

Expertise: Optical and UV Spectroscopy, r-process abundances, nucleosynthesis models. Website

Yangyang Li

Graduate Student (Now Research Scientist at KLA, Ann Arbor, MI)

Expertise: Multi-D and NLTE radiative transfer and spectral line formation, Developing computational tools implementing NLTE, Advanced computational techniques and Machine Learning

Nicholas Barth

Graduate Student

Expertise: Old stellar systems, Early type galaxies and faint dwarf galaxies, r-process abundances, observations and data reduction pipelines, instrumentation