Vivian U

Assistant Researcher
vivianu@uci.edu
2182 Frederick Reines Hall
Research Area: 
Education: 

Ph.D. in Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2012
M.S. in Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2008
B.S. in Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, 2006

Vivian U is an observational extragalactic astronomer who uses state-of-the-art telescopes to understand how galaxies and their supermassive black holes coevolve. She has co-led a Keck adaptive optics program to observe resolved gas dynamics in merging galaxies that found nearly ubiquitous nuclear gas and stellar disks, measured dynamical black hole masses, identified dual active nuclei through kinematics, and discovered shocked molecular outflows at small scales. Her current and future research builds upon these findings and further explores the black hole-galaxy connection in detail using the Keck Observatory, Lick Observatory, and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.

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