About me

Cosmologist, astronomer (MSc), engineer (BSc), researcher, and science outreacher. Raised in Brazil. Music enthusiast, chocolate addicted. Have worked in Fortune-500 companies, such as Shell and Coca-Cola, but quit to persue an academic career. Currently investigating the nature of dark energy as a PhD student at University of Florida. Have used supernovae, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and even the interstellar medium to study the history of the universe.

Education

  • University of Florida Gainesville, FL, USA
    PhD candidate in Astronomy
    Thesis: Modeling line intensity mapping in hydrodynamical simulations
  • Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
    Master of Science in Astronomy
    Thesis: Optimizing observations of supernova peculiar velocities
  • Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
    Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering
    Thesis: Project of a finance tracking mobile app focused on low-income families

Academic Projects

    Here I explain the main projects I have led or been strongly involved in. For a full list of papers I collaborated on, please check Google Scholar.
  • Modeling intensity mapping experiments in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations
    K Garcia, D Narayanan, G Popping, R Anirudh, S Sutherland, M Kaasinen
    I led the development of a tool (slick) that combines cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with thermal/radiative/chemical equilibrium PDR models to calculate CO/[CI]/[CII] line luminosities from every gas particle in different redshifts of the simulation. With this tool, we are able to build light cones from z=0 to z=10. For more details, check out our paper on arXiv, submitted to ApJ.
  • New, fully symmetric, method for the 3PCF line of sight
    K Garcia, Z Slepian
    The 3-point correlation function (3PCF) is a powerful tool for cosmology as it goes beyond the 2PCF, and probes late-time non-Gaussianities. To access its information, we must track the 3PCF’s dependence not only on each triangle’s shape, but also on its orientation with respect to the line of sight. We developed a method that measures the 3PCF while keeping the line of sight fully symmetric between the triangles' triplet members. For more details, you can check out our paper published in MNRAS.
  • Finding galaxy clusters in the Boötes field with Spitzer
    K Garcia, A Gonzalez, M Brodwin, N Hansen, T George, A Trudeau, K Thongkham et al.
    We identified >4,000 galaxy cluster and group candidates in the 9.3 deg^2 Boötes region, among which >1,000 lie beyond z = 1.5, and >500 beyond z = 2. The catalog was built based on a wavelet-style algorithm and photometric redshift probability distributions using data from Spitzer Deep Wide-Field Survey, NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey, Infrared Boötes Imaging Survey, and Large Binocular Cameras imaging.
  • Constraining σ8 with supernova peculiar velocities
    K Garcia, M Quartin, B B Siffert
    We investigated the optima survey strategies to measure peculiar velocity fields with Type Ia supernovae. By varying the observational parameters, such as the area of the sky we are looking at, the depth being reached and the cadence, we found out which combination gives the best estimate on σ8 using supernova peculiar velocities. For more details, take a look at the paper published in Physics of the Dark Universe.
  • Detection of Type Ia supernovae
    B B Siffert, K Garcia, M Quartin
    We developed a pipeline for supernovae detection focused on surveys that make use of narrow-band filters, such as J-PAS, J-PLUS and S-PLUS.

Outreach Involvement

  • Ad Astra Academy
    Educational outreach and documentary project whose objective is to inspire disadvantaged students to discover opportunities through science and exploration. I am part of the team since 2015. [Article][Website]
  • Astrotubers
    Brazilian outreach Youtube channel with >80k followers that aims to make science accessible and enjoyable by everyone. I was one of the founders and have been one of the project's coordinator since 2017. [Youtube Channel]
  • Twitter Threads
    I write about Astronomy in general mostly in Portuguese. [Twitter Profile]