The Joint Space-Science Institute is pleased to welcome Dr. Jonathan McKinney to the Physics Department faculty. McKinney received his PhD in 2004 from the University of Illinois under the supervision of Charles Gammie, and then spent three years at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics as an Institute for Theory and Computation Fellow working with Ramesh Narayan. He was then awarded an Einstein (Chandra) Fellowship and worked with Roger Blandford at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University.
Dr. McKinney is a leader in the general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) description of accretion around black holes and other compact objects and the structure of astrophysical jets, topics that are focus areas of JSI. He has developed simulation tools with exceptionally robust stability, allowing GRMHD simulations spanning black hole horizons to run millions of times as long as the dynamical time scales. These simulations and related studies have shed new light on the physics of relativistic jets, including the possible role of magnetic reconnection.