Melanie Habouzit, Ph.D.

Melanie Habouzit carried out her PhD studies on the Formation of supermassive black holes in Paris at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) which she finished in 2016. Subsequently, she moved to New York and became a Flatiron Postdoctral Fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (2016-2019). Melanie is now both a MPIA Postdoctoral Fellow and GLIESE Fellow at the Max Planck Institut fur Astronomie (MPIA) and the Zentrum fur Astronomie (ZAH), in Heidelberg, Germany.

Her research interests lie in the field of galaxy formation and evolution. Dr. Habouzit is particularly interested in understanding how these supermassive black holes form in the very early Universe, and how they grow to produce the variety of black holes that we observe today. Her research also focuses on the connections between the central black holes and their host galaxies, and their co-evolution through cosmic times.

To advance our understanding of the early Universe, she performs large-scale cosmological simulations with her model for the formation of supermassive black holes. These simulations are powerful tools to understand the formation of supermassive black holes, their evolution, their number density, the galaxy black hole occupation fraction. She is actively working on using these simulations and other state-ofthe- art large-scale simulations (IllustrisTNG, Horizon-AGN) to prepare upcoming missions such as e.g., JWST, WFIRST, LISA, and Athena.