JD'Silva

About Me

I am an astrophysicist from Perth, Western Australia! My current work is focussed on understanding the physics of star formation and the growth of super massive black holes across cosmic time through the analysis of the energy distributions of galaxies.

Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope are at the centre of my research as I aim to unveil the properties of among the first galaxies to ever exist in the Universe and the sources of cosmic reionisation.

In addition to astronomy, I have a few hobbies. I enjoy reading 📖, hiking 🌲, photography 📸 and surfing 🏄‍♂️.

Highlights

Spectral energy distribution fitting

Better understanding the spectral energy distributions of galaxies is a key element of my research. The colour of fireworks gives an indication of their chemistry, for example red fireworks are made from strontium. The same is also true in galaxies where their colours are signatures of the physical properties of the stars, gas, dust and super massive black holes in the galaxies. The plot below shows an example spectral energy distribution and model fits to the observed light computed with the software ProSpect. Click the image to read the paper where this work was presented!

JumProPe

I am the lead developer of the novel JWST image processing pipeline: JWST UWA Multiwavelength ProTools Processing Endeavour. JumProPe was designed to be user-friendly and easily deployable to smoothly start processing images from both the Near Infrared Camera and the Mid Infrared Imager of JWST. JumProPe has since been used to prepare data for many publications and was even featured on a few NASA press releases, including the Christmas Tree Cluster that was published in the New York Times in November, 2023. Click the image to learn more!

Career information

Publications

Click below to see the NASA ADS library of my publications 👇

Curriculum vitae

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Education

Doctor of Philosophy - University of Western Australia [2022-2026]

Thesis title: Cosmic Odyssey of Star Formation and AGN activity

Master of Astrophysics - University of Western Australia [2020-2021]

Bachelor of Science - University of Western Australia [2017-2019]

Contact Me

Email: jordan.dsilva@research.uwa.edu.au

Github: JordanDSilva

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jordandsilva

ORCID: 0000-0002-9816-1931