Chervin Laporte, Ph.D.

Chervin Laporte was a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy department at Columbia University. He received his master’s degree from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany.

Laporte is interested in galaxy formation and in particular the astrophysical properties of dark matter, which he has studied through cosmological N-body simulations. He has used and ran simulations to study the assembly of the most massive galaxies in the universe and assess the systematic effects of triaxiality on the inference of the dark matter distribution in dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Lately, Laporte studied the mixing processes occurring at the center of galaxy clusters between dark matter and stars. He found that repetitive dissipationless mergers can lead to a significant amount of mass re-distribution and expansion of the central dark matter component in clusters such as to bring their total density profiles (predominantly stars and dark matter) to an almost universal form like those found in dark matter-only simulations.