New Gliese Fellow 2015: Dr. Diederik Kruijssen

Dr. Diederik Kruijssen has taken up his new position as the Gliese Fellow 2015 at the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ARI) of the ZAH.

Dr. Kruijssen received his PhD in astrophysics from Utrecht University in 2011, after carrying out his research as an NWO Toptalent Fellow at the universities of Utrecht, Leiden and Cambridge. From 2011 to 2015, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max-Planck Institut für Astrophysik in Garching bei München. In 2013, he received the Christiaan Huygens Prize of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences for the best Dutch PhD thesis in Astronomy & Space Sciences during the four years 2009-2012.

His research interests range from the formation of stars, planets, and globular clusters to the large-scale assembly of stellar mass and galaxy formation. With his work, Dr. Kruijssen tries to answer the overarching question of how all stars in the Universe formed.

During the next years as a Gliese Fellow, Dr. Kruijssen plans to study the cloud-scale physics of star formation and feedback, covering the formation of globular clusters in the early Universe to galactic star formation at the present day. For this purpose, he will apply novel observational and numerical methods that enable an unprecedented view on the small-scale baryonic physics that drive the large-scale evolution of galaxies.