Principal investigators

Kirsten Kraiberg Knudsen
Kirsten is professor at the department of Space, Earth and Environment of Chalmers University of Technology. Her research concerns galaxy formation and evolution and Kirsten focuses in particularly on star forming galaxies at cosmological distances.
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Susanne Aalto
Susanne is also professor at the department of Space, Earth and Environment of Chalmers University of Technology. She studies star formation, supermassive black holes and powerful winds and outflows in galaxies near and far using IR and radio instruments.

Gunnar Nyman
Gunnar is a professor at the department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at Gothenburg University. His research is in theoretical and computational treatments of chemical reaction kinetics and dynamics, both in gas phase and condensed phase. He particularly focusses on processes that occur in interstellar molecular clouds.
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Wouter Vlemmings
Wouter is a professor at the department of Space, Earth and Environment of Chalmers University of Technology. He studies the dust and gas during late stages of stellar evolution, magnetic fields, massive star formation and general radio and submm interferometry.
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Group members

Schirmer Thiébaut
Thiébaut is a post-doctoral researcher at Chalmers University of Technology. His research focusses on the dust properties in different environments such as photon-dominated regions, AGB, and high-z galaxies. He studies how dust responses to the physical conditions through mechanisms leading to grain growth (accretion, coagulation) or destruction (photo-destruction, fragmentation).
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Rasoul Hashemi
Rasoul is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at Gothenburg University. He studies reaction rate theories and their applications in different chemical processes.
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David Gobrecht
David is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at Gothenburg University. His research focuses on theory of dust nucleation and formation from a bottom-up perspective, physico-chemical modelling of different astrophysical environments, and global optimisation techniques as well as chemical-kinetic rate networks.

Duncan Bossion
Duncan is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at Gothenburg University. His research focuses on molecular dynamics of small systems of astrochemical interest. He uses various methodologies from quasi-classical to exact quantum methods and has an experience in method development for path-integral based non-adiabatic dynamics.
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Martina Šimsová (née Zámečníková)
Martina is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at Gothenburg University. She is experienced in radiative association theoretical studies and similar phenomena for diatomic molecules with astrochemical applications. Currently, her focus is on formation and reactions of gas-phase precursors of dust.
PhD students

Gustav Olander
Gustav is a PhD student observing and modelling dust emission in galaxies and around SuperMassive Black Holes (SMBH). He aims to understand how dust emission evolves together with black hole accretion and star formation.
Affiliated local group members


Matthias Maercker
Matthias is a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology. His recent research focuses on the return of dust from evolved stars, and the effect the dust may have on the medium between the stars.
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Girts Barinovs
Ģirts is associated professor at the Department of Physics of University of Latvia. He will join GU group in 2022 for his sabbatical leave. His research focuses on numerical modeling, including applications of molecular dynamics to model crystal growth and applications of quantum dynamics to model photochemistry in the interstellar medium.

Stefan Andersson
Stefan is an adjunct associate professor at the department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg. His research concerns the use of various computational chemistry tools to study the dynamics and kinetics of molecules in gas phase and condensed phase. Special focus areas are both the initial steps of dust formation as well as chemical processes in interstellar ices.
Affiliated non-local group members

Arka Sarangi
Arka Sarangi is a researcher at the Dark Cosmology Centre (DARK) of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. His research is based on modeling dust formation in extreme astrophysical environments. He specializes in studying supernovae, AGNs, and various evolved massive stars, in terms of their roles in forming dust in galaxies. He is associated to this project as a visiting researcher at the Chalmers University of Technology.
Find his contact details here.