# Peter Nugent

Peter Nugent Ph.D.
Senior Scientist, Division Deputy for Scientific Engagement & Acting Dept. Head for Computational Science
Phone: +1 510 486 6942
Fax: +1 510 486 5812

Peter Nugent is a Senior Scientist and Division Deputy for Science Engagement in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and an Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley. He is also currently serving as interim department head for the Computational Sciences Department.

Dr. Nugent attended Bowdoin College and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics with a concentration in astronomy from the University of Oklahoma. He joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1996 as a postdoctoral fellow working with Saul Perlmutter on the measurement of the accelerating universe with Type Ia Supernova, for which Dr. Perlmutter received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. He currently runs the largest astrophysical transient discovery pipeline created to-date, the Palomar Transient Factory and is the PI on the development of the Nyx code used to perform large adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamical + n-body simulations to calculate the absorption spectra caused by neutral hydrogen in the cosmological environment - a Lyman alpha forest cosmology simulator - for surveys such as BOSS and BigBOSS.

Dr. Nugent has presented his work as a participant on PBS News Hour, NASA's Space Science Update program, CNN, NOVA, NPR, and BBC. His work has also been featured in Time, Newsweek, Science and Nature.

## Journal Articles

### E. O. Ofek, D. Fox, S. B. Cenko, M. Sullivan, O., D. A. Frail, A. Horesh, A. Corsi, R. M., N. Gehrels, S. R. Kulkarni, A., P. E. Nugent, O. Yaron, A. V. Filippenko, M. M., L. Bildsten, J. S. Bloom, D., I. Arcavi, R. R. Laher, D. Levitan, B. Sesar, J. Surace,"X-Ray Emission from Supernovae in Dense Circumstellar Matter Environments: A Search for Collisionless Shocks",Astrophysical Journal,2013,763:42,doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/763/1/42

The optical light curve of some supernovae (SNe) may be powered by the
outward diffusion of the energy deposited by the explosion shock (the
so-called shock breakout) in optically thick (