Viraj Pandya

Viraj Pandya is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University. His research centers on extragalactic astronomy, specifically galaxy formation and evolution, star formation, and high-energy astrophysics. Recent work includes tracing the cosmic baryon cycle in IllustrisTNG, analyzing galaxy morphology and size-color gradients from the CEERS survey, and developing hybrid physics-informed, data-driven models like 'sapphire' to bridge hydrodynamical simulations and semi-analytic methods. He also investigates the impact of cosmic filaments on morphological evolution and has contributed to supernova spectroscopy.