Physics GRE Discussion Forums

as above ^^

I dont have a CS major, but I have plenty of CS and applied math courses, and I'm also a big fan of data mining/pattern recognition.

bump; I'm in a similar position and am curious in others opinions.

cornell astronomy?

Chicago, Princeton, Harvard, UCSC as well. Maryland is also well known. UC Irvine has some well known computational people.

Irvine is a great quality/reputation bargain in computational astrophysics. Also, outside of the US, a lot of computational cosmologists moved to Paris, and there's a big group in Vancouver.

Is there a particular type of astrophysics you're interested in? The answer will be different for CMB/dark matter/large scale structure/catalogues/etc.

I'm particularly interested in the intersection of computational astrophysics + planetary sciences. Actually, my own institution (Washington) is strong in that since it has Tom Quinn and Rory Barnes, although I'm doing research with another professor right now.

Berkeley has quite a bit of computational research, and actually a good number of them interested in either planetary formation, star formation, or the ISM.

NYU is big into Sloan, since the east coast is pretty much bugger for any other astronomy. Ditto for UMCP. UIUC's department is computationally leaning as well.

Ah, thanks for the examples. What about astroinformatics?

Look for some people who've already applied in the field for a good starting list, i.e. here:
http://www.physicsgre.com/viewtopic.php ... 073#p30073

then look at the faculty there, find what collaborations they belong to, and where other collaborators are, and make your own shortlist of 20-25 schools. Then research further, and cut down.

To add to this excellent advice, look for papers on google scholar on stuff you're interested in and track down where the professors are from. Then browse their research web pages and the facilities at that school. The more you show that you've done some of your own homework and can ask more educated and directed questions, the more people are going to want to help you.

Okay good points.

I'll try to do more of my own research next time. I actually mostly just wanted a thread for computational astrophysics students to gather around (especially those lurkers who might not have posted already), but I probably should have made that more explicit in the thread title.

rhythm_keeper wrote:Maryland is also well known.

It is? Thats not what I thought based on what I saw on their website

I know Arizona is one of the best for instrumentation, but what about for computational astro?

I second Maryland. Chicago is also good, because they have a large supercomputing presence (they host a major NSF computational resource).

Oh funny, we're having the same discussion at http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=470438