Nickolas Kokron
Postdoc at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study
I received my PhD in Physics from Stanford University, advised by Risa Wechsler. I also worked with other professors at Stanford including Tom Abel and Leonardo Senatore. I collaborate closely with friends from across the bay including Stephen Chen, Joe DeRose, and Martin White. I have also done fun science with Arka Banerjee, José Luis Bernal and my better half.
I grew up in the concrete jungle of São Paulo, Brazil, where I attended the Molecular Sciences Program at Universidade de São Paulo. My senior thesis in cosmology was supervised by Rogerio Rosenfeld and Fabien Lacasa.
I'm interested in the formation of large-scale structures in the Universe. That is, how did the Universe grow from its smooth and homogeneous initial conditions to the complex cosmic web of dark matter inhabited by galaxies that we see today? How does dark energy affect this process, and how can we use observations of galaxies to learn about its nature?
Most of my recent work is at the interface of analytic techniques ("effective field theories") and N-body simulations of structure formation. You can find my publications here, and a one-paragraph summary of selected publications in the research tab. If you have any questions or would like to chat more about my work feel free to reach out!
In my spare time you'll probably find me listening to music, grilling churrasco, playing computer games or, until recently, climbing Palo Alto's surrounding hills on a bike. Given an extended block of spare time you would've most likely found me on a road trip across the American West hauling hiking and camping gear in a station wagon (I took a 4400 mile-long road trip when moving, you can see some of the sights I was lucky to see here!).
email:
kokron at astro🍕princeton🍕edu (replace the pizzas with a dot)
or
kokron at ias 🚲 edu (replace the bicycle with a dot)
github: github.com/kokron
google scholar