University of Notre Dame physics graduate student Xinghai Zhao is the winner of the 2010 Center for Research Computing award for Computational Sciences and Visualization. This prestigious award consists of a plaque and a check for $1,000. Zhao is receiving this honor for his novel simulations on the formation and evolution of curvature structure in the universe and the formation and evolution of the Local Group of galaxies.
In addition to being a graduate student, Zhao performs research studying the effects of local inhomogeneities on the expansion rate of the universe using large-scale structure simulations, and is a member of the Notre Dame Center for Astrophysics and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics.