I am Momar Dieng. I was born in 1978 in Dakar, Senegal. I have
lived in many places including Romania, (ex)Yougoslavia, Tunisia,
Guinea, Italy, but nowadays I spend most of my time in Saint Paul, Minnesota,
where I go to Macalester college. I am a Math/Physics double major and a computer
science minor (don't ask why or how: I did
not think I was a masochist either!).
I got involved in
astrophysics after an Intersession course on introductory Astronomy
with Kim Venn. Foem then on, I participated in several research
projects under her supervision, all of which are being written up in a
soon-to-be-published paper (yeaahhhh!!).
I spent most of summer in Toronto, where I was invited by the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) as an undergraduate summer research fellow. There, I got to work with top dynamicists and cosmologists (among which my supervisor, John Dubinski) and got to do real physics research and also party in the world's coolest city. My task at CITA was to quantify effects of a the tidal field of a galactic cluster on the morphology and dynamics of a single infalling galaxy. In other words I was modeling the internal dynamics of a single (typical elliptical) galaxy as it journeyed through the gravitational field of cluster. This involved writing a lot of C code to model the gravitational interaction (N-Body problem) and measure kinematic properties of the galaxy (such as the amount of disk heating, the mass loss due to stripping and creation of tidal tails...). I also produced littles movies of the interactions which you will soon be able to view on this site. I learned a lot on galaxy dynamics and cosmology as well as N-Body-related programming. Working at CITA was fun and the atmosphere was very laid-back but at the same time challenging. Follow the Summer at CITA link for more info.