Jo Bovy

My research focuses on galactic dynamics, galaxy formation and evolution, the astrophysical study of dark matter, and astrostatistics. I aim to build an empirical picture of how galaxies like our own Milky Way evolve over time, starting as tiny fluctuations in the density of matter only fractions of a second after the Big Bang and morphing into the majestic celestial objects that we observe today, fourteen billion years later. By combining data from various large-scale surveys of the Milky Way, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Gaia mission, and the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment, with sophisticated chemo-dynamical modeling and machine-learning techniques, my group has been able to map the stellar structure of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail from its innermost bar-shaped region to the outer stretches of the ghostly stellar halo surrounding the disk and we have determined the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way with high precision, deriving strong constraints on the fundamental nature of dark matter. I have also written widely-used software tools for research in astrophysics, such as the galpy Python package, developed new statistical methods for analyzing large astronomical datasets, and written a widely-used textbook on the dynamics and astrophysics of galaxies that is freely available online.