I am currently a Research Associate in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Rutgers. Prior to joining this group in 2009, I was a PIRE postdoctoral fellow at UPenn and Princeton. I received my PhD in Astrophysics in 2006 from the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS) in Trieste, Italy.
You can find me in office W311, Serin Building, or contact me by email at vacquaviva_at_physics.rutgers.edu or by phone at 732-445-5500, ext. 5883.
Viviana Acquaviva
Research
I enjoy studying different aspects of Cosmology. As a scientist, I find many puzzles fascinating, but the accelerated expansion of the Universe beats them all. I am especially interested in phenomenological aspects of Dark Energy models and theories of Gravity beyond General Relativity. Most recently, I have been studying how to use galaxy surveys to test the concordance cosmological model, but along the way I have considered many other probes, from the CMB to weak gravitational lensing.
Understanding the physical properties of galaxies has been a major focus of my research since my arrival at Rutgers. Without a fair assessment of galaxies’ mass and clustering properties, how can we use them to learn about the Universe? With this task in mind, I wrote a Markov Chain Monte Carlo code, GalMC, to fit the spectral energy distributions of galaxies. Read more about GalMC and try it out here.
Don’t have data yet? If you are planning a survey and would like to know how well you can constrain the physical properties of galaxies with your observations (or want to try out a few different ones and see which one works best), you are welcome to use GalFish.
Teaching
During Spring 2011, I taught an introductory Astronomy Course for non-science majors, focused on Stars and Galaxies. It was a great experience and I certainly learned more than I taught. You can check out the course’ “legacy website” here.
CV and Publications
Word Games
I love word games, and I love Astronomy. Click here to see the results of this combination, and feel free to send feedback.
