Paul Zivick

Paul Zivick's area of focus is in near-field cosmology, which aims to understand fundamental aspects of the universe, like the nature of dark matter, using observations in and around our Milky Way galaxy. In particular he studies the internal kinematics of nearby dwarf galaxies, galaxies thousands of times less massive than the Milky Way. These galaxies, given their small size, are expected to be highly sensitive to the structure of dark matter in which they live, making studying the motions of the stars inside these galaxies an excellent test of both dark matter and more broadly how galaxies evolve on this extreme end of the galaxy mass spectrum. To measure these stars requires high-precision observations, which are best conducted from space-based observatories, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gaia Space Telescope. Before arriving at Texas A&M as a postdoctoral research associate, Paul was a doctoral student at the University of Virginia where he earned his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Nitya Kallivayalil, where his doctoral thesis was titled "Deciphering the Internal Kinematics of the Small Magellanic Cloud in the Age of HST and Gaia."