About me




Hi, I'm Jaeden! I am an NSERC Graduate Fellow and third-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. Through my co-directorship of the Caltech Project for Effective Teaching (CPET), I oversee and facilitate a series of programs and workshops geared towards evidence-based teaching for graduate students and postdocs.

My Research

Active Galactic Nucleus Structure

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. (2026a). See also the simulation details in Hopkins et al. (2025).

Hot Dust Obscured Galaxies

Fully resolving dust and stars from galactic scales down to allows us to make predictions of the heating mechanisms of dust in galaxies with AGN. We use a super-zoom-in simulation to understand how the density and temperature distributions of the stars and dust shape hot dust obscured galaxy (Hot DOG) spectra in Bardati et al. (2026b).

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 do

Contact

I am best reached by email: jbardati@caltech.edu.