About

I am an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Wayne State University, Michigan. Prior to my appointment at Wayne State, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Professor Ryan Hickox’s group at Dartmouth College. I completed my Ph.D. at the Department of Physics, Yale University, under the supervision of Professor Meg Urry. I am interested in how supermassive black holes are triggered into activity, how the structure of the tori around them changes, how they affect their host galaxies, and when they gained most of their mass. My research has been featured in Science News in SN 10: 10 Scientists to Watch 2020.

My most recent project involves constraining the accretion rate distributions of AGNs in different environments (i.e., different levels of obscuration) using data from the the Swift-BAT 70-month survey (see this article for a summary). This project was featured in Astrophysical Journal’s Year in Review 2022 as the second most downloaded and one of the most popular papers of 2022 across all AAS Journals.

One of my thesis projects involved constructing a neural network that derives an X-ray luminosity function (XLF) of active galactic nuclei (AGN). This XLF matches all current constraints on AGN in the X-ray waveband. I plan to extend this analysis in optical and IR wavelengths. I have also calculated photometric redshifts for AGN using multi-wavelength datasets for one of the largest volume X-ray surveys to date (Stripe 82X).

I also have an ongoing X-ray stacking software project (StackFast) which uses all available Chandra observations. This software takes in a list of RA and Dec, and outputs the results of stacking photons in each position.

My curriculum vitae can be found here.

tonima@wayne.edu