Charlotte Ward

Pronouns
she/her/hers
Title
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Office
132 Peyton
Bio/Description

Interests: Understanding supermassive black hole formation and growth via transient phenomena in time-domain survey data. I use the Zwicky Transient Facility and the HSC-SSP transient survey (with additional spectroscopic and radio follow-up) to study: low mass AGN in dwarf galaxies which inform our understanding of massive BH seeding channels, SMBHs which were ejected from their galaxy nuclei due to prior mergers, double-peaked broad-line AGN which probe the geometries of AGN accretion disks, and state-changing AGN with recently triggered episodes of accretion. I am developing multi-resolution image analysis techniques for combining time-resolved ground and space-based survey data to better extract the properties of transients and their host galaxies (e.g. positions, SEDs, galaxy morphologies). I also develop software for extracting accretion disk properties from spectra of AGN and tidal disruption events.