Mathieu Renzo

Mathieu Renzo's interest in astronomy comes from the wide range of physical processes occurring astronomical context. He focuses on stellar physics, and in particular massive stars, binary evolution, and explosions. His interests include stellar kinematics (runaway, "walkaway", and hyper-velocity stars), core-collapse and (pulsational) pair-instability supernovae, nuclear astrophysics, X-ray binaries, time-domain and gravitational-wave astronomy. He mainly uses analytical and numerical simulations to understand massive star evolution, their explosions, and how they interact in binary systems. He uses both detailed stellar structure and evolution models (e.g., with MESA), and rapid population synthesis (e.g., with binary c or COSMIC), possibly coupled with galactic dynamics with cogsworth. He also simulates the light coming from explosions (e.g., with SNEC) and is learning to run multidimensional hydrodynamic simulations (with ATHENA++).

Dr. Renzo studied at the University of Pisa for his bachelor and master's degrees, then moved to Amsterdam for PhD, to work with Selma de Mink. In 2017, he spent one semester as KITP graduate fellow at UCSB, and completed his PhD in 2019. After that he moved to New York city where he spent four years between the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Flatiron Institute and Columbia University.