news archive – Black Holes and Galaxies Research Group

22 January 2025: The Report from the Definition Committee of the Roman Space Telescope High Latitude Wide Area Survey (for which RCH is co-chair) has now been released at the Roman Community Forum along with the other CCS reports.
21 January 2025: Group alum Kendall Sippy ’24‘s paper on Impacts of UV Radiation from an AGN on Planetary Atmospheres and Consequences for Galactic Habitability has been accepted for publication in ApJ. Congratulations!
23 March 2024: Our research group had a productive visit to two-week Durham University (where RCH is on sabbatical), including talks, a visit to the COSMA supercomputer (below), and a meeting of the North East Accretion Alliance.
6 March 2021: Graduate students Chris Carroll and Wei Yan have accepted postdoctoral positions with leading research groups at Washington State and Penn State, respectively. Looking forward to the next stage of your scientific careers!
11 Dec 2020: This week members of our group took part in the virtual conference on Supermassive Black Holes organized by a number of our colleagues in Chile. It was a very engaging and scientifically productive meeting.
8 Dec 2020: Graduate student Chris Carroll‘s paper on the discovery of a large population of heavily obscured AGN has been accepted to the Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations!
16 March 2020: As of today, our group will be working from home as Dartmouth transitions to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our group will continue to actively pursue research over video conferencing and online collaboration tools. Best wishes to all as we face this enormous global challenge.
3 March 2020: Graduate student McKinley Brumback has accepted a postdoctoral position with the science team of the NuSTAR X-ray observatory at Caltech, starting this fall. Congratulations!
16 March 2020: As of today, our group will be working from home as Dartmouth transitions to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our group will continue to actively pursue research over video conferencing and online collaboration tools. Best wishes to all as we face this enormous global challenge.
13 March 2020: Graduate student McKinley Brumback has accepted a postdoctoral position with the science team of the NuSTAR X-ray observatory at Caltech, starting this fall. Congratulations!
15 February 2020: Graduate student Kelly Whalen has been awarded a AAS International Travel Grant to travel to the Extreme Galaxies in Extreme Environments conference in Iceland. (Update: This meeting has now been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
10 January 2020: Graduate student Wei (Vivyan) Yan has been selected as a writer for the science websites astrobites and guokr. Looking forward to seeing her articles!
6 January 2020: Profs. Ryan Hickox and Jedidah Isler traveled with Dartmouth graduate students McKinley Brumback, Christina Gilligan, and Katie Weil to the American Astronomical Society Annual Meeting in Honolulu, where we presented research and programmatic initiatives, and had a booth at the graduate recruiting fair.
27 December 2019: Prof. Ryan Hickox has been elected to the Executive Committee of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society. I look forward to serving the high-energy astrophysics community in this role.
10 December 2019: Graduate student McKinley Brumback‘s paper on Modeling the precession of the warped inner accretion disk in the pulsars LMC X-4 and SMC X-1 with NuSTAR and XMM-Newton” has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Congrats!
6 December 2019: Three members of our group had the pleasure of attending the 20 Years of Chandra Science Symposium in Boston from 3-6 December. Prof. Ryan Hickox gave an invited talk “Science with Deep Surveys”, graduate student Wei Yan presented her work on X-ray stacking in the Chandra Deep Field South, and postdoc Alberto Masini presented the latest on the Chandra Deep Wide-Field Survey. There were talks on amazing science throughout, and we even heard a fascinating panel discussion by the astronauts of the STS-93 shuttle mission who launched Chandra. Thanks to all the organizers for a wonderful meeting!
1 December 2019: Graduate student Kelly Whalen’s paper on “Physical Models for the Clustering of Obscured and Unobscured Quasars” has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations!
27 November 2019: Prof. Ryan Hickox has been appointed Vice-Chair of the Executive Committee of NASA’s Physics of the Cosmos Program Analysis Group (PhysPAG), starting January 2020. I look forward to serving NASA’s astrophysical community in this role.
25 November 2019: Postdoc Tonima Ananna’s paper on Accretion History of AGN II: Constraints on AGN Spectral Parameters using the Cosmic X-ray Background “ has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations!
13 November 2019: Our group has been awarded time from NRAO for a Very Large Array program (PI: R. Hickox) on “Diffuse Emission from a Spectacular Extended Outflow in a Massive Galaxy Merger”, to examine the radio emission from Makani (described below). This work will be carried out by students here at Dartmouth in collaboration with an international group of colleagues.
29 October 2019: A paper co-authored by Prof. Ryan Hickox and led by Prof. David Rupke (Rhodes College), has been accepted for publication in Nature. This paper presents the discovery of Makani, an enormous (100 kpc) outflow detected in [OII] with the Keck Cosmic Web Imager. See here for a popular article including fascinating 3-D visualization of the outflow by collaborator Jim Geach (Hertfordshire) and his colleagues.
1 September 2019: Members of our group contributed to a number of White Papers submitted to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey. These include Science White Papers on resolving the cosmic X-ray background, the cosmic evolution of supermassive black holes, the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies, extremely obscured galactic nuclei , the future of high-redshift galaxy cluster science, and an APC White Paper on the HEX-P X-ray mission.
30 August 2019: The Final Report for the Lynx X-ray Observatory Mission Concept Study has been submitted to NASA and is available to the community. We are excited about this revolutionary X-ray observatory that will transform our understanding of the Cosmos.
11 July 2019: Postdoc Alberto Masini‘s paper on “Measuring the Obscuring Column of a Disk Megamaser AGN in a Nearby Merger” has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations!
1 July 2019: Postdoc Lauranne Lanz has started a new position as an Assistant Professor in Physics at The College of New Jersey. She will be missed, but we’re very much looking forward to continuing collaborations in the future. Congratulations and good luck Lauranne!
15 June 2019: Congratulations to graduate student McKinley Brumback for winning the Physics and Astronomy Graduate Research Award!
21 May 2019: Prof. Ryan Hickox and Prof. David Alexander (Durham) traveled to Iceland in preparation for the special tenth-year workshop in our black hole series, “What Drives the Growth of Black Holes? A Decade of Reflection” to be held in Reykjavík from 21-25 September 2020.
6 May 2019: Seven members of our group traveled to MIT to present at the 2019 New England Regional Quasar and AGN Meeting, presenting work on obscured AGN and the history of black hole accretion. Thanks to our regional AGN colleagues for a fascinating and enjoyable day!
21 March 2019: Prof. Ryan Hickox, postdoc Lauranne Lanz, and graduate student McKinley Brumback traveled to Monterey, CA to present at the 17th Meeting of the AAS High Energy Astrophysics Division, which also included a special session of the NASA PCOS X-ray Science Interest Group, of which Prof. Hickox is co-chair.
6 December 2018: Our group is currently advertising for a postdoctoral position on AGN and galaxy evolution, with a focus on large data sets and NASA archives. Applications are due 3 January 2019; details on the position and application instructions are available here.
1 December 2018: Prof. Ryan Hickox is very pleased to have the opportunity to present a plenary talk at the 233rd AAS Annual Meeting in Seattle from 6-10 January 2019. The talk will be titled “The Energetic Universe in Focus: Twenty years of Science with the Chandra X-ray Observatory”, on the morning of Wednesday, 9 January. I look forward to highlighting Chandra‘s amazing scientific legacy and looking toward the future of high-energy astrophysics.
30 November 2018: Prof. Ryan Hickox has been appointed to the Executive Committee of NASA’s Physics of the Cosmos Program Analysis Group (PhysPAG) as a member of the X-ray Science Interest Group (XRSIG). It will be a pleasure to serve the NASA science community in this role.
8 November 2018: Graduate student Wei Yan has had her journal article on “NuSTAR and Keck Observations of Heavily Obscured Quasars Selected by WISE” accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations!
8 November 2018: Postdoc Lauranne Lanz‘s paper on “Investigating the Covering Fraction Distribution of Swift/BAT AGN with X-ray and IR Observations” has been accepted for publication in ApJ. Congratulations all around!
27 September 2018: Postdoc Alberto Masini‘s paper on “The NuSTAR Extragalactic Surveys: Unveiling Rare, Buried AGNs and Detecting the Contributors to the Peak of the Cosmic X-ray Background” has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations!
10 September 2018: Our NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program program on “Harnessing the Full Power of NASA Wide-Field Surveys: X-Ray Stacking of Sources from NASA Observatories with the Entire NuSTAR and Chandra Archives”, has been selected for funding. Looking forward to working with colleagues at Princeton in developing powerful X-ray analysis tools.
1 September 2018: Our collaborative Astronomy and Astrophysics program on “Extreme Starbursts and Outflows: The Formation of Massive Compact Galaxies” has been selected for funding by the National Science Foundation. We will be working with colleagues at UCSD, Wisconsin, Bates, and Kansas to explore the cosmic evolution of massive compact starburst galaxies.
3 August 2018: Our research group co-organized this year’s Durham-Dartmouth international workshop on “Are AGN Special?: The Environmental Dependence and Global Impact of AGN Activity”. Eight members of the group traveled to Durham, UK to present at an exciting and enjoyable meeting.
14 June 2018: Our upcoming review article, Hickox & Alexander 2018, “Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei” in Annual Review of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 56, is now available on the arXiv. An animated version of Figure 4, showing a schematic of AGN spectral energy distributions, is available here.
29 May 2018: Undergraduates Emily Golitzin ’18 and Raphael Hviding ’18 have successfully completed the defense of their Senior Honors Theses, both on spectroscopic studies of ionized gas regions in obscured AGN. Congratulations to both! And good luck to Raphael next year in graduate school at Arizona.
23 May 2018: Nine members of our group, including five graduate students and undergrad Emily Golitzin ’18, traveled to Yale University to present at the 2018 New England Regional Quasar and AGN Meeting. Thanks to our colleagues at Yale for a stimulating and enjoyable day!
1 May 2018: Graduate student Mackenzie Jones has completed the defense of her Ph.D. thesis entitled “Where Do AGN Hide? Uncovering the Full Population of Growing Black Holes and their Host Galaxies and Halos”. Congratulations Mackenzie!
23 April 2018: Graduate student McKinley Brumback has been awarded time on the X-ray space observatories NuSTAR and XMM-Newton for new observations of the X-ray pulsar Hercules X-1. Congratulations!
20 April 2018: A number of members of our group have been awarded AAS Intenational Travel grants to travel to the UK for the Dartmouth-Durham workshop on “Are AGN Special?” that we are co-organizing with our colleagues in Durham this summer.
12 December 2017: Graduate student McKinley Brumback has had her paper on NuSTAR observations of of the X-ray pulsar SAX J2103.5+4545 accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations McKinley!
12 December 2017: Undergraduate Raphael Hviding ’18 was featured in a news article on the Dartmouth homepage for his work using SALT. The article also highlighted research by graduate student Meridith Joyce, who is completing her PhD with Prof. Brian Chaboyer and is collaborating with Dr. Shazrene Mohamed from the South African Astronomical Observatory.
12 November 2017: Graduate student Mackenzie Jones has won honorable mention for the Rodger Doxsey Travel Prize for the AAS Annual Meeting, where she will be presenting her Dissertation Talk. This is an extremely competitive award and great recognition of her work.
1 November 2017: Undergraduate Raphael Hviding ’18 has had his paper on spectroscopy of heavily obscured quasars with SALT accepted for publication in MNRAS. Congratulations Raphael on your first paper!
11 September 2017: Our group’s paper on SEDs and colors of obscured and unobscured quasars has been accepted for publication in ApJ.
11 September 2017: Graduate student Mackenzie Jones‘s paper on modeling AGN populations with semi-analytic models has been accepted for publication in ApJ.
1 July 2017: Prof. Ryan Hickox has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, and was awarded Dartmouth’s Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarly or Creative Achievement. This is a nice recognition of the excellent work by all the members of our research group and collaborators around the world.
15 June 2017: Six members of our research group traveled to George Mason University in Virginia for a conference on Elusive AGN in the Next Era. The conference was well-organized by our colleagues Shobita Satyapal and Nathan Secrest, and we had an engaging and enjoyable week!
1 July 2017: Prof. Ryan Hickox has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, and was awarded the Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarly or Creative Achievement. This is a nice recognition of the great work by members of our research group and collaborators around the world.
7 June 2017: Congratulations to graduate student Mackenzie Jones, who has been awarded First Prize by the Neukom Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research in Computational Science for 2017, sponsored by Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute. This is well-deserved recognition for her excellent thesis research.
22 May 2017: Undergraduate Meg Lane ’17 successfully defended her honors thesis on “X-ray Spectral Modeling of Obscured AGN with Torus Models and Comparison to Mid-IR Emission”. Congratulations Meg on her excellent thesis work and on graduation!
27 April 2017: Graduate students from our group recently presented their work at the Dartmouth Graduate Poster Session. Congratulations to McKinley Brumback (right), who received one of five awards for her poster on studies of X-ray pulsars with NuSTAR and XMM.
7 February 2017: Prof. Ryan Hickox was recently elected as a member of the American Astronomical Society Nominating Committee, which prepares slates of candidates for AAS offices. It will be a privilege to serve our professional society.
4 February 2017: Former Dartmouth graduate student Chien-Ting Chen (now at Penn State) has recently had two papers accepted to The Astrophysical Journal in which he collaborated with our group: on the X-ray to infrared luminosity relationship in quasars, and on AGN in dwarf galaxies detected by NuSTAR. Congrats!
18 November 2016: This week I traveled to the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC to attend a Face-To-Face of the Science and Technology Definition Team (STDT) for Lynx (previously X-ray Surveyor) a NASA mission concept study for the 2020 Decadal Survey. I am co-chairing the Science Working Group on the Evolution of Structure and AGN populations. This was followed by a trip to Pasadena, CA to present results at the NuSTAR Science Meeting 2016.
5 October 2016: Postdoc Mike DiPompeo‘s latest paper on “A unifying evolutionary framework for infrared-selected obscured and unobscured quasar host haloes” has been accepted for publication in MNRAS. Congrats!
26 August 2016: Graduate student Seth Cohen successfully defended his PhD thesis, on “Substructure and Star Formation in Galaxy Clusters”. Congratulations Seth!
12 August 2016: This week our group hosted the latest Dartmouth-Durham international workshop, on “The Hidden Monsters: Obscured AGN and Connections to Galaxy Evolution in the Era of NuSTAR and WISE”. Approximately 100 AGN researchers from around the world (shown at right) came to Hanover to discuss studies of obscured AGN. A very exciting week for all!
26 July 2016: This week I traveled to Cambridge, MA to attend the first meeting of the Science and Technology Definition Team (STDT) for X-ray Surveyor, a NASA mission concept study for the 2020 Decadal Survey. I am co-chairing the Science Working Group on the Evolution of Structure and AGN populations.
18 July 2016: The Chandra Deep Wide-Field Survey (PI: Hickox, with an international team of Co-Is) has been approved as a Large Program for Chandra Cycle 18. CDWFS is a 1 million second program (the largest in this year’s cycle) that will map a deep, wide area in the Bootes extragalactic survey field.
3 July 2016: Our research group, including graduate students Mackenzie Jones and Chris Carroll as well as undergraduates Parker Gardner ’17, Meg Lane 17′, and Raphael Hviding ’18 traveled to Garching, Germany to present results at the workshop on “AGN: What’s in a Name?” at the European Southern Observatory. Meg’s travel was supported by Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center and she shared her experiences in this article.
5 May 2016: Graduate student Mackenzie Jones‘s paper on the intrinsic Eddington ratio distribution of narrow-line AGN in the SDSS survey, has been accepted to The Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations!
25 March 2016: Our group’s paper on the narrow-line regions of a pair of merging AGN, led by former postdoc Kevin Hainline and using data from MDM Observatory, has been accepted to The Astrophysical Journal.
14 January 2016: I am delighted have been awarded an Faculty Early-Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation. This highly competitive award, with anticipated funding of $672,000 over five years, will fund research by our group on “The Hidden Monsters: Cosmic Evolution of Obscured Supermassive Black Holes” and will support our AstroConnect program connecting scientists to classrooms via video chat.
10 January 2016: Chris Carroll, McKinley Brumback, and Raphael Hviding ’18 traveled to MDM Observatory on Kitt Peak in Arizona for a five-night run on the 2.4-meter Hiltner telescope, to observe ionized regions of interstellar gas around active galactic nuclei.
9 December 2015: Prof. Ryan Hickox had the great privilege of giving a talk on “The Hidden Monsters: Obscured AGN in the era of Chandra, NuSTAR, and WISE” at part of the Steve Murray seminar series (in memory of our mentor and collaborator Dr. Steve Murray) in the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
15 November 2015: Postdoc Mike DiPompeo’s paper on clustering and CMB lensing of WISE-selected quasars has been accepted to MNRAS. The latest set of papers on the NuSTAR Extragalactic Survey program have also been posted to arXiv (COSMOS catalog, ECDFS catalog, number counts, luminosity function).
12 November 2015: We successfully held our first order-of-magnitude estimation workshop (funded by the National Science Foundation) for 14 teachers from New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wyoming. Details and resources are available here.
15 October 2015: As part of our AstroConnect program, which brings astronomers into classrooms via video chat discussions, Prof. Hickox is delighted to be collaborating with Connect with STEM, serving as a Connector for Bronx Charter School for the Arts for the 2015-16 school year.
1 October 2015: Graduate student McKinley Brumback was recently featured in a Dartmouth Graduate Forum article, reflecting on her first year in the Ph.D. program.
20 September 2015: Undergraduate group member Raphael Hviding recently returned to campus after a summer spent running hands-on astronomy programs with the public in the White Mountains, as part of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Astronomy program, in collaboration with the Carthage College Institute of Astronomy.
15 September 2015: Postdoc Kevin Hainline has now moved on to a position at Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, to join the team behind the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. Best of luck Kevin, we’re looking forward to launch in 2018! Meanwhile, our group is delighted to welcome postdoctoral researcher Mike DiPompeo, a long-time collaborator who will be focusing on studying the large-scale environments of obscured quasars with WISE and SDSS.
13 September 2015: Congratulations to graduate student Mackenzie Jones, who has been awarded a NASA MUREP ASTAR fellowship to support her graduate research on supermassive black holes and AGN demographics. For her fellowship will be collaborating with Dr. Ann Hornschemeier and Dr. Andy Ptak of Goddard Space Flight Center to study the X-ray characteristics of star-forming galaxies and AGN.
1 September 2015: Graduate student Chris Carroll attended the La Serena School for Data Science in La Serena, Chile. He had a great experience learning the latest techniques for handling large astronomical data sets and made contacts with astronomers from around the world.
4 June 2015: Our group hosted the annual New England Regional Quasar and AGN Meeting at Dartmouth on Thursday June 4. The meeting was very stimulating and enjoyable; see the full meeting site for abstracts and photos from the meeting.
22 April 2015: Chien-Ting Chen has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis titled “Supermassive Black Hole Accretion and Connections to Star Formation in Galaxies”. He will be moving to Penn State this summer for a postdoctoral position with Prof. Niel Brandt focusing on data from NuSTAR. Congratulations Dr. Chen!
18 April 2015: Graduate student Seth Cohen’s paper on star formation and structure in galaxy clusters using SDSS and WISE data has been accepted to The Astrophysical Journal. Congratulations to Seth on accepting a position as a teacher of Astronomy and Physics at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH.
13 April 2015: Undergraduate Tom Whalen ’14 (currently at the Chandra X-ray Center) has had his paper on X-ray emission from the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 (right, image courtesy NASA/CXC) accepted to The Astrophysical Journal.
20 Jan 2015: Graduate student and Neukom Graduate Fellow Chien-Ting Chen‘s paper on the connection between star formation and dust obscuration in quasars has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal.
8 Jan 2015: Group members Ryan Hickox, Kevin Hainline, and Chien-Ting Chen traveled to the AAS Annual Meeting in Seattle from 5 to 8 January. Hickox and Hainline gave contributed talks, and Chen presented a disseration talk that was very well attended.
5 Dec 2014: Our paper on the molecular outflow in a compact star-forming galaxy (Geach et al. 2013, image at right) has been published in Nature. This result has received some nice press, including articles from Dartmouth Now, National Geographic and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (along with accompanying podcast).
1 Nov 2014: We are currently seeking candidates for a postdoctoral position starting September 2015, to work on observational studies of the cosmological evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies. The application deadline is 2 January 2015. For details and application instructions please click here.
16 Aug 2014: Postdoc Kevin Hainline‘s paper on our SALT spectroscopic survey of WISE-selected obscured quasars has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal.
3 Aug 2014: Our group traveled to Durham, UK to help run and present our work at the workshop on AGN v. Star Formation” (Group members from left to right: Chen, Hickox, Carroll, Hainline, Jones.)
3 Jun 2014: Graduate student Chien-Ting Chen has been named a Neukom Graduate Fellow for 2014-15. The Neukom Institute for Computational Science will fund the last year of his graduate thesis research on the connection between star formation and AGN activity in galaxies.

Department of Physics and Astronomy
Dartmouth College
6127 Wilder Laboratory
Hanover, NH 03755
+1 (603) 646-2962
ryan.c.hickox@dartmouth.edu
Images courtesy NASA
Last updated 10 April 2026