Matthew Orr, Ph.D.

Matt joined the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute as a Flatiron Research Fellow in Fall 2022. Before joining the CCA, he was a postdoc at Rutgers University, working with Prof. Blakesley Burkhart, and he completed his Ph.D. in 2019 at the California Institute of Technology under the advisement of Prof. Phil Hopkins, investigating star formation scaling relations in the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) cosmological zoom-in simulations. Matt originally hails from La Cañada Flintridge in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in sunny Southern California.

Matt’s research focuses on the connections between star formation, stellar feedback, and the turbulent interstellar medium of galaxies. He develops and uses simple analytic models to interpret spatially resolved observations and the results of cosmological zoom-in simulations. He also works with the FIRE zoom-in simulations, using them as a lens through which to understand the emergence of various star formation scaling relations, and the self-regulation of galaxies on kiloparsec scales.