Leonardo Werneck

Postdoc fellow

University of Idaho, ID, USA

Contact | About me | Research | Notes | Misc

Contact

Office
EP 314 - Department of Physics - University of Idaho

E-mail
wernecklr@gmail.com

Mailing address
875 Perimeter Drive, MS 09035
Moscow, ID 83844-0903
United States

About me

Hi, my name is Leonardo (Leo) Werneck, and I am currently a postdoc reseacher at the University of Idaho, where I am conducting research under supervision of Prof. Dr. Zachariah B. Etienne. I am also a member of the TCAN collaboration on Binary Neutron Stars. I was a postdoc at West Virginia University from Oct. 2020 to Oct. 2021, where I worked on the same project I am currently working on.

I have obtained my Ph.D. in Physics from the Institute of Physics of the University of São Paulo (USP), under supervision of Prof. Dr. Elcio Abdalla (see the BINGO telescope website!), where we have mostly worked with critical phenomena in the gravitational collapse of massless scalar fields. During my Ph.D. I have visited Zach Etienne at WVU and we have worked on extending the equation of state support of IllinoisGRMHD (IGM), a compact, user-friendly, and robust GRMHD code. IGM is a rewrite of the original GRMHD code of the Illinois Relativity Group, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I have also obtained a M.Sc. in Physics, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Victor O. Rivelles, and a Teaching Degree in Physics, where my undergraduate research was supervised by Prof. Dr. Artour G. Elfimov, both from USP.

My CV (Updated May 2024)

Research

My research fields are those of Numerical Relativity and Computational Astrophysics. I have dedicated a good fraction of my Ph.D. to the study of gravitational collapse of massless scalar fields.

Currently my research focuses on the implementation of advanced equations of state for IllinoisGRMHD, so that we can more realistically model neutron stars (NS). We are also working on adding neutrino physics to IllinoisGRMHD.

SFcollapse1D is an open-sourced, user-friendly code I have developed during my Ph.D. which allows the user to study the gravitational collapse of massless scalar fields in spherical-like coordinates. The code is able to accurately track the critical solution by making use of non-uniform numerical grids that fully explore the symmetries of the problem and dramatically increase the resolution near the center of the simulation. This code is based on the original algorithm developed by Matt Choptuik, but our grid choice allows us to solve the problem without making use of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) routines.

NRPyCritCol is an open-sourced, user-friendly code documented in pedagogical Jupyter notebooks to study critical collapse using the BSSN formulation of Einstein’s equations. It uses the NRPy+ infrastructure to generate highly optimized C code (with SIMD and CSE support) that allows for robust evolution of the Klein-Gordon equation of a massless scalar field minimally coupled to the spacetime metric.

Notes

Misc

I love cooking in general and baking in particular. I usually love making simple, yet delicious, Brazilian desserts and treats, such as brigadeiros, walnut or pecan camafeus (couldn’t find a link in English, sorry), and pudins (which is the Brazilian version of crème caramel). I also love making traditional North American treats like chocolate chip cookies, apple or pecan pies, pancakes, burgers, pizzas, and many more!

I have always loved eating bread, but never had success in making a loaf from scratch and baking it in my home oven. During the 2019-2020 COVID-19 pandemic, I have had a lot of time at home to practice and improve my bread making skills and got fairly decent at it. I fell in love with artisan sourdough loaves, specifically because of the fact that they take so long to make but require very little human interaction, which is perfect for my daily routine. I plan on sharing some recipes (or, more accuratelly, formulas) and tips for sourdough baking in the future.