Dr Tom Bending

I am a postdoc in the astrophysics group working with Matthew Bate on the STFC funded project "Bringing together star formation and galaxy formation calculations to interpret the stellar populations of galaxies"

My main research interests are the interstellar medium; the star formation that occurs within it, along with the resulting stellar populations; and the energy released by the most massive of these stars — a phenomenon known as stellar feedback. These feedback mechanisms -- particularly photoionisation and supernovae -- play a crucial role in shaping large-scale star formation, the composition and structure of the interstellar medium, stellar clustering, galaxy evolution and the initial mass function. You can find my publications here.

To study these phenomena, I use highly parallelised and efficient computer codes to simulate astrophysical hydrodynamics. The difficulty of performing simulations at the necessary spatial and temporal resolutions within a practical timeframe has fostered my deep interest in high-performance computing. I closely follow advances in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), and I enjoy the challenges of parallelising and optimising code, as well as implementing detailed models of stellar feedback physics. Most recently, I have begun exploring how GPUs can be leveraged to accelerate SPH simulations further.