Computational astrophysics with Professor Douglas Swesty At present I have several research opportunites for computer literate undergraduates in computational physics and computational astrophysics. The only requirement is that the students have some programming experience on Unix systems, i.e. the student should have done well in AST/PHY277 or have equivalent experience. One of the areas in which students could easily become involved relates to development of scientific visualization tools to help analyze data from computer simulations of supernovae and proto-neutron star cooling. Such phenomena involving very interesting physics from a number of areas such as nuclear and particle physics, thermodynamics, fluid flow, etc. which the student could gain a qualitative understanding of while developing tools to help us visualize our results graphicly. I could easily involve a student that had only a sophomore level physics background on such a project. Another area in which I could engage a slightly more advanced student (a junior or senior) would involve the development of unstructured mesh methods for simulating fluid flow and radiation flow through materials. Such techniques could be useful for a variety of computational physics problems including computational simulations of inertial confined fusion (ICF) experiements and computational modeling of astrophysical objects. The mathematics of these methods is not overly complex but the development of effective algorithms requires that the algorithms be tested on a variety of validation problems. This could easily lead to publications for an advanced undergraduate student. November 2003