Daniel Proga (Physics and Astronomy) was awarded one of NASA's most prestigious research grants through the Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics Networks (TCAN) program. The grant totals $1,547,537 and will be shared with four other major research institutions: the Institute for Advanced Study, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Virginia, and the Flatiron Institute. Proga is the principal investigator and UNLV will serve as the head node of this network collaboration to advance the state of the art in modeling accretion and outflow processes in astrophysics using supercomputers. Proga has spent much of his career researching accretion disk winds, emphasized in the name of the collaboration: A New DAWN (Disk Accretion and Winds Network). The name also reflects the ambitious goals of the project, as the resulting modeling capability is expected to usher in a new dawn in our understanding of the environments of black holes, neutron stars, and newly born stars. The full UNLV team consists of associate professor and co-investigator Zhaohuan Zhu, postdoctoral researcher Tim Waters, and graduate students Randall Dannen and Shalini Ganguly. This major grant will provide funding support for this team for a period of three years in addition to supporting several other researchers at the partnering institutions.
