Welcome to my IfA homepage. My main webpage is here:

https://www.phys.hawaii.edu/~dfarrah/

Below you can find a brief, possibly outdated, summary.

I’m an associate professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and also graduate faculty at the Institute for Astronomy. My research field is observational extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology. I also teach some courses in the undergraduate program.

For further information, please see under the Research and Teaching tabs. For information on available student projects and some background on my advising style, please see under Research. If you are interested in undertaking a graduate or undergraduate project with me, drop me an email.

This page gives a brief summary of my current research interests. Graduate student projeccts are usually available in at least some of these areas – for details, please drop me an email.

Galaxy and SMBH mass assembly

The assembly of galaxies over the history of the Universe is fundamental to understanding our own origins, and for using galaxies themselves as probes of the expansion of the Universe. In this regard, a fundamental question is: why do at least most galaxies seem to have a supermassive black hole at their centers? And why does the mass of this SMBH seem to scale with cetain properties of their hosts? I am interested in addressing this question, by studying how galaxy scaling relations change with redshift, and what factors may plausibly drive this evolution.

Active Galaxies and Starbursts

It is well-established that a significant fraction of all stellar and supermassive black hole mass in the low-redshift Universe assembled in relatively short, intense bursts of star formation and SMBH accretion, mostly at redshifts between about z=0.5 and z=5. The physics of these two processes, and how they may or may not affect each other, are however still controversial. I am interested in how these processes assemble galaxies over cosmic time, and in the details of their physics, especially the geometry and structure of the AGN obscurer.

Observational Constraints on Black Hole Physics

Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the Universe. There is overwhelmingly strong evidence for their existence, but their physical nature remains controversial. Depending on your point of view, the most prevalent physical models for black holes offer windows into new physics that is as yet unknown, and/pr are themsselves an approximation to some deeper reality that we have yet to determine. I am interested in observational tests of black hole physics on large temporal and spatial scales that could give insights into their nature. </p>

PRIMA

The Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (<a href=”https://prima.ipac.caltech.edu/”>PRIMA</a>) is a next generation far-infrared observatory, currently under Phas A study and with a planned launch date in the 2030s.