Brian O'Shea is a computational and theoretical astrophysicist studying cosmological structure formation, including galaxy formation, the behavior of the hot, diffuse plasma in the intergalactic medium and within galaxy clusters, and (more recently) terrestrial high energy density plasma physics phenomena. He is also a co-author of several open source software tools including the Enzo, Enzo-E, and Athena-PK codes, an expert in high performance computing, and an advocate for open-source computing and open-source science. He received his B.S. in Engineering Physics at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2000, and his PhD in physics from UIUC in 2005. Following that, he was a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, with a joint appointment between the Theoretical Astrophysics Group and the Applied Physics Division. Since 2008, he has been a member of the faculty at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment between the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering (2015-present), the Department of Physics and Astronomy (2008-present), and the DOE Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (2014-present). From 2008-2015, Dr. O'Shea was a member of Lyman Briggs College. He has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles in astrophysics, computer science, and education research journals, and has received a variety of awards for his teaching and public outreach efforts. In 2016, he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and in 2019 he became the Director of MSU's Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research.
A headshot (click the image for an extremely high resolution version):
(And here is a much sillier picture if you want to use that instead.)
