Niel Brandt


William Nielsen Brandt is the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and a professor of physics at the Pennsylvania State University. He is best known for his work on active galaxies, cosmological X-ray surveys, starburst galaxies, normal galaxies, and X-ray binaries.

Education

Brandt was born in Durham, North Carolina, but mostly grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin. He attended Milton High School in Milton, Wisconsin, and Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. His undergraduate studies were done at the California Institute of Technology, where he lived in Blacker Hovse and was awarded the George Green Prize for Creative Scholarship. His graduate studies were done at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge with Andrew Fabian.

Career

From 1996 to 1997 Brandt held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where he worked with colleagues including Martin Elvis and Belinda Wilkes. In 1997, he took up an assistant professor appointment at the Pennsylvania State University. He was promoted to associate professor in 2001, full professor in 2003, Distinguished Professor in 2010, and Verne M. Willaman Professor in 2014.

Research and teaching

Brandt's research focuses on observational studies of
supermassive black holes and cosmological X-ray surveys. Specific
objects investigated include actively accreting SMBHs
, starburst galaxies, and
normal galaxies. His work utilizes data from facilities at the
forefront of astrophysical discovery, including the
Chandra X-ray Observatory, XMM-Newton, NuSTAR, and the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He is also involved with
upcoming projects including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,
the Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics,
and new X-ray missions. In his cosmological X-ray surveys work,
Brandt has been a leader in obtaining the most-sensitive X-ray
surveys to date, including the Chandra Deep Field-North and the
Chandra Deep Field-South. These have been used to
explore the demography, physics, and ecology of typical
growing SMBHs over most of cosmic history. They have also
allowed the study of X-ray source populations in starburst
and normal galaxies out to cosmological distances.
In his general AGN studies, he has investigated AGN winds, the X-ray
properties of the first quasars, and extreme AGN populations
.
He has also worked on investigations of the
cosmic microwave background radiation and the effects of neutron-star
and black-hole natal kicks. Brandt is an author of more than
500 research papers on these subjects.
Brandt leads a small research group including postdoctoral
researchers, graduate students, and undergraduate students.
Many of them, after developing their skills via their research
projects, have gone on to win professorial and permanent staff
positions as well as distinguished fellowships and scholarships,
becoming new leaders around the world in astrophysics.
Brandt also regularly teaches courses on high-energy
astrophysics, black holes, and active galaxies.

Selected awards