Selma de Mink is a MacGillavry Assistant Professor and PI of the ERC starting grant program BinCosmos. De Mink joint the faculty in 2014 after spending time in the US as a Hubble Fellow at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University (2010-2013) and an Einstein/Princeton Lyman Spitzer Fellow at Carnegie Observatories and the California Institute for Technology. Recent awards include a Marie Curie Fellowship (2015), a Beller Lectureship awarded by the American Physical Society (2017) and the MERAC early career award in theoretical astrophysics awarded by the European Astronomical Society (2017).
De Mink’s is an expert in the evolution of massive stars and is especially interested in how two stars interact in binary systems. She focusses on the complex physical processes as well as the broad implication for chemical enrichment, feedback and the diversity of explosive transients that mark the death of massive stars. Her background lies in theory and computation, but she is deeply involved in various observing programs and PI of program with the Hubble space telescope and ALMA. Recent high impact work includes the progenitors of binary black holes as gravitational wave sources.
Massive stars, Interacting binaries, Gravitational wave sources, supernova and gamma-ray burst progenitors, stellar feedback, chemical enrichment, epoch of reionization.