Max Lee

Max is a final-year PhD student at Columbia University working with Zoltán Haiman and Shy Genel (Flatiron Institute). He is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, an AAS National Osterbrock Leadership Fellow, and a Lead Teaching Fellow at Columbia's Center for Teaching and Learning. His work focuses on how galaxy-scale physics, such as supernova winds and black hole jets that redistribute gas within and around dark matter halos, affects weak lensing. His goal is to jointly constrain galaxy formation and cosmology, rather than treating galaxy formation as a systematic to marginalize over. His thesis examined where existing models of baryonic effects fail, at which halo masses and radii baryons influence cosmological statistics, and what happens to the gas inside halos when the feedback model changes. Through this work, he developed BIND, a field-level generative model that paints baryons onto dark-matter-only simulations. He also found that while feedback acts nonlinearly on halos, weak lensing statistics are close to linear in a handful of halo properties that multiwavelength probes already measure. He is a member of the CAMELS and Learning the Universe collaborations.

Max's path to academia was highly nonlinear and involved many years traveling the country, working on organic farms, and managing environmental non-profit fundraising offices. He returned to Cabrillo Community College, where he was inspired to pursue physics and astronomy. After obtaining associate degrees in Math and History, he transferred to UC Berkeley and completed a BA in Physics and Astronomy. He then spent a year doing research with Zoltán Haiman at Columbia before enrolling in graduate school. He has tutored community college and transfer students throughout his own studies, and is passionate about science communication, outreach, and the arts.