Postdoc positions

Sorry, we don’t have any postdoc vacancies available right now. We will update this page with news as soon as possible.

PhD positions

A list of astronomy PhD projects available at St Andrews is provided here. Please contact potential supervisors in whose projects you are interested to find out more.

Applications can be submitted online here.

We encourage potential UK PhD students to apply before the 1st of February each year, to start in September of that year. International applications will be considered when positions with appropriate funding become available.

Summer undergraduate projects

Are you an undergraduate in St Andrews, the UK or abroad? Are you interested in undertaking a 6-10 week research project with us in St Andrews over the summer break? We have a variety of projects on offer. Please contact us for more information on research and funding.

Summer projects we offered in 2016:

Constraining the dust properties of post-starburst galaxies -- Dr. Vivienne Wild

Post-starburst galaxies are a particularly interesting and unusual class of galaxies, apparently caught in a transition phase between gas-rich star-forming disks and gas-poor quiescent elliptical galaxies (Wild et al. 2009, MNRAS, 395, 144). The process(es) that cause this transition for the galaxy population as a whole are poorly constrained. One popular model invokes major gas-rich mergers, which are able to disrupt the stellar orbits sufficiently to turn a disk galaxy into an elliptical. Models indicate that these gas-rich mergers drive a massive short-lived starburst, which can subsequently be detected as a post-starburst galaxy before the galaxy enters the red-sequence. Better constraining the properties of the post-starburst galaxies will help us to observationally determine the role of gas rich mergers in building the red sequence. This 8-10 week project will involve two phases: (1) adapting a piece of code that builds models of galaxy spectral energy distributions to include the emission from dust in the far-infrared; (2) using these models to recover the physical properties of post-starburst galaxies in the low and high redshift Universe.

Spatially resolving galaxies -- Dr. Vivienne Wild

MaNGA is a new integral field survey, which is obtaining spatially resolved spectroscopy for thousands of galaxies in the local Universe. The survey is currently in progress, and there are a huge variety of topics we could address with this new dataset. Which topics are actually feasible, and of the greatest interest, by the summer of 2015 will depend on several factors. Examples of topics we could investigate are: 1) The spatially resolved star formation histories of AGN host galaxies. In Wild et al. 2010 (MNRAS, 405, 933), we found a temporal offset between the recent burst of star formation and AGN activity in the galaxy. This could be a dynamical effect, as the gas takes time to spiral into the black hole in the centre of the galaxy. This should be detectable as a gradient in the stellar populations of the AGN host galaxies. 2) The dust distribution of galaxies. When we measure dust obscuration properties in local galaxies, we find they correlate with the total star formation rate and inclination angle of the galaxy (Wild et al. 2011, MNRAS, 417, 1760). With the spatial information provided by MaNGA observations, we will be able to dig further into the cause of these correlations. Do the dust properties depend more on the local or global properties of galaxies? This is important for understanding the chemical evolution of galaxies, and helping to correct our observations for the effect of dust obscuration.

Deriving physical properties of simulated and observed galaxies from their spectra -- Dr. Noelia Jimenez

Measuring the physical properties of galaxies is crucial in order to understand their evolution. In this project we will use both numerical simulations and real data to study the Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs) of different types of galaxies. The aim is to explore the accuracy of the predictions of galaxy physical properties by applying the same SED fitting method to simulated and observed data. The student will have the opportunity to analyse real observational data and work with the state-of-the-art galaxy simulations.

Check back soon for 2017 projects!