Nushkia Chamba

Affiliation: NASA Ames Research Center (ARC)/ Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU)

Email: nushkia.chamba@nasa.gov

Professional Biography

Dr. Nushkia Chamba is a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow since late 2023. She analyses faint structures in the outskirts of galaxies using multi-wavelength, long exposure (deep) imaging.  Her work at Ames supports ongoing efforts to advance NASA’s current and future missions such as Hubble and Chandra towards the preservation and physical characterization (e.g. size) of faint halos around galaxies. 

Before Ames, she was a Marie Curie Ph. D. fellow at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Spain as part of an International Training Network called SUNDIAL, an interdisciplinary collaboration between astronomers and computer scientists across Europe. Her thesis explored a new concept of galaxy size related to star formation in the boundaries of galaxies. After graduating in Spain during the COVID pandemic in 2020, she moved to Sweden for a postdoctoral fellowship at The Oskar Klein Center/Stockholm University, where she worked on new techniques for measuring the impact of environment on the sizes of galaxies. Her work in Stockholm was in preparation for similar goals with the Vera Rubin Observatory and was supported by the LSST Dark Energy Science Dark Matter working group. 

She is additionally passionate about Scientific Writing, especially considering non-native English speakers, and has given several workshops at various universities as well as at the European Astronomical Society and International Astronomical Union conferences.

Education

B. Sc. in Physics, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE  (2016)

Diploma in High Energy Physics and Cosmology, Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Italy  (2017)

Ph. D. in Astrophysics, Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias/Universidad de La Laguna, Spain (2020)

Research Interests

Galaxy Formation and Evolution, Physics of Star formation and the Interstellar Medium, Cosmology and Dark Matter, Scientific Writing

Selected Publications

Chamba, N. , Hayes, M. & LSST DESC, 2023, ‘The impact of environment on size: Galaxies are 50% smaller in the Fornax Cluster compared to the field’, Astronomy & Astrophysics, in press

Chamba, N. ,  Trujillo, I & Knapen, J. H., 2022, ‘The edges of galaxies: Tracing the limits of star formation,’, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 667, id.A87, 22 pp. 

Chamba, N., Knapen, J. H. & Black, D., 2022, ‘How to plan your astronomy research paper in ten steps,’ Nature Astronomy, Volume 6, p. 1015-1020

Trujillo, .I , Chamba, N. & Knapen, J. H., 2020, ‘A physically motivated definition for the size of galaxies in an era of ultradeep imaging,’ Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 493, Issue 1, p.87-105

Chamba, N. ,  Trujillo, I & Knapen, J. H., 2020, ‘Are ultra-diffuse galaxies Milky Way-sized?’  Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 633, id.L3, 8 pp.