D.J. Pisano
West Virginia University
Department of Physics
244 Hodges Hall
P.O. Box 6315
Morgantown, WV 26506
USA
I am an assistant professor in the Physics department here at WVU and an adjunct assistant astronomer at the NRAO. I arrived here in January 2009 from the NRAO in Green Bank, WV where I worked as a postdoc. I previously worked at the Naval Research Lab and the ATNF. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001 and my B.S. from Yale in 1996.
I am an astronomer interested in how galaxies form and evolve. I use radio telescopes around the world primarily to study neutral hydrogen (HI) in our own Milky Way and other, more distant galaxies. Projects I am actively working on include studying the high-velocity clouds (HVCs) around the Milky Way using the Galactic All-Sky Survey (GASS), a recently completed HI survey of the southern sky using the Parkes radio telescope. An image of the survey is shown here:
I am also looking for low mass HI clouds and diffuse HI emission associated with nearby galaxies, such as NGC 2997 (below), and in groups of galaxies that may be analogous to the HVCs seen around the Milky Way and may be sources of fuel for future star formation in galaxies.
Another aspect of my research involves radio studies of luminous compact blue galaxies (LCBGs). These are prolifically star-forming galaxies that are common in the distant universe, but are exceedingly rare today. I am part of an international collaboration studying LCBGs in the local universe in order to better constrain the current nature and evolutionary fate of LCBGs in the distant universe.
For my research I have used the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, Arecibo in Puerto Rico, the Parkes radio telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in Australia, and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India as well as a few others.
Please contact me if you are interested in doing undergraduate or graduate research in my group.
Publications
Click here for a complete list of my publications from ADS:
Publication List
And sorted by citation count:
Publications ranked by citation
Teaching
I am also fortunate to be teaching astronomy here at WVU.
Spring 2009 – ASTR106 – Descriptive Astronomy
