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David-Uraz, Alexandre

Assistant Professor

FACULTY

Biography

Dr. David-Uraz is a professor in the Department of Physics since Fall 2024. Prior to joining Central Michigan University, Dr. David-Uraz held postdoctoral appointments at the Florida Institute of Technology (2016), the University of Delaware (2017-2020) and Howard University (2020-2024; working offsite at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center). He completed his undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Physics at Université de Montréal, before obtaining an M.Sc. (Astrophysics) from the same institution, and later a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario.

More about Alexandre David-Uraz

View a list of recent publications.

  • Ph.D., Physics (Astrophysics), Queen's University at Kingston, 2016

  • M.Sc., Physics (Astrophysics), Université de Montréal, 2011

  • B.Sc., Mathematics and Physics, Université de Montréal, 2009

Research Interests: 

  • Stellar astrophysics
  • Multiwavelength observations of stars (photometric, spectroscopic, and spectropolarimetric)
Research Projects:

Despite their relatively small number, hot massive stars emit strongly ionizing radiation and interact with their surroundings via their fast, dense winds during their lifetime, and via a cataclysmic supernova explosion upon their demise. As such, they are crucial to the cycling of both gas and energy in galaxies. The heavy metals they produce constitute some of the key ingredients of life, and their remnants (neutron stars and black holes) are among the most extreme objects in the Universe. As the number of gravitational wave detections steadily increases, heralding the advent of multi-messenger astronomy, it is particularly timely to study the progenitors of these compact stellar remnants as their detailed evolution fundamentally impacts the properties of the coalescence events that we observe.

Dr. David-Uraz's research focuses on the winds of the most massive stars in our Galaxy, investigating this phenomenon using a combination of multi-wavelength observations and numerical simulations. In recent years, Dr. David-Uraz has dedicated significant effort to understanding how these outflows interact with the large-scale magnetic fields that are found on the surface of a subset of these stars, particularly through time-domain investigations using large datasets of high-precision space-based photometry.