About me



Hi, I'm Jaeden! I am an NSERC Graduate Fellow and second-year physics PhD student at Caltech. I am broadly interested in theoretical astrophysics with an emphasis on supermassive black holes and their connection to galaxies and gravitational waves. I also have a passion for teaching and enjoy volunteer tutoring and serving as a teaching assistant whenever I can. I currently serve as a Co-Director of the Caltech Project for Effective Teaching (CPET), where I oversee and facilitate a series of programs and workshops geared towards evidence-based teaching for graduate students and postdocs. I did my BSc in physics at Bishop's University in Québec, Canada with a minor in mathematics. I generally like to spend my free time hiking, powerlifting and playing music.

My Research

Active Galactic Nucleus Dust

Recent "super-zoom-in" simulations of active galactic nuclei (AGN) have allowed for the study of physics continuously from cosmological scales down to a few Schwarzschild radii. Such a simulation uniquely allows us to investigate the dust torus and broad line regions of AGN without assuming a predetermined structure. We present the first infrared spectral predictions of this self-consistently generated quasar in Bardati et al. (2025). See also the full simulation in Hopkins et al. (2025).

Massive Black Hole Merger
Host Galaxies from Imaging

Mergers of supermassive black holes (SMBH) produce gravitational waves detectable by future experiments such as LISA or pulsar timing arrays. However, finding the host galaxy of a detected SMBH merger is not trivial. In Bardati et al. (2024a), we find that the presence of permanent morphological features such as a prominent bulge may be indications of SMBH merger hosts.

Massive Black Hole Merger
Host Galaxies from Kinematics

Continuing on previous work, we investigate the line-of-sight velocity and velocity dispersion maps of SMBH merger host galaxies. In Bardati et al. (2024b), we find that SMBH merger hosts are characterized by a more prominent bulge, slower rotation, and stronger kinematic misalignments. See also the application of these results to real galaxies in Horlaville et al. (2025).

Some more things I've done

Contact

You can best reach me at my email jbardati@caltech.edu, but you can also find me on my social media at the bottom of the page.