About Me

Awards / Grants 

1.  Future Investigator, 2023 NASA FINESST Research Grant (USD 148, 826.00) (PI: Robert Fisher) (declined)

2.  Graduate School Dean's Fellowship, Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland College Park (2023)

3.  Chancellor's Centennial Engineering Scholarship, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (2023)

4.  Graduate Research Award, Department of Physics, UMass Dartmouth (2022)

5.  Distinguished Student Award, American Physical Society Forum on International Physics (2022)

6.  Division of Astrophysics Travel Grant, American Physical Society Division of Astrophysics (2022)

7.  Teaching Excellence Award, National Institute of Physics UP Diliman (2018)

 ('Gawad Direktor para sa Natatanging Bagong Guro', 'Gawad Direktor para sa Natatanging Recitation Instructor')

Professional Experience and Service to the Field

1. Graduate Research Assistant, University of Maryland College Park (Spring 2024 - present)

2. Social Media Coordinator, University of Maryland GRADMAP (September 2023 -present)

3. Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Maryland College Park (Fall 2023)

4. Graduate Teaching Fellow, UMass Dartmouth (September 2022 - May 2023)

5.  Graduate Research Assistant, UMass Dartmouth (June 2021 - August 2022)

   •   Graduate Research Award - Department of Physics 

6.  Graduate Teaching Assistant, UMass Dartmouth (January 2021 - May 2021)

7.  Physics Instructor, University of the Philippines Diliman (August 2018 - December 2020)

   •  Teaching Excellence Award (Natatanging Bagong Guro, Natatanging Recitation Instructor) - National Institute of Physics

Schools

1.  Burgers Program Summer School on Turbulence, University of Maryland Burgers Program for Fluid Dynamics (2024), see poster of my current project here

2.  LANL Co-Design Summer School, Los Alamos National Laboratory (2023), see poster of our work here and a photo of our team 

3.  MESA Summer School, UC Santa Barbara (2022)

4.  NSF/APS-DPP GPAP Summer School on plasma physics for astrophysicists, Swarthmore College (2021)

5.  Deciphering Dark Matter: From Galaxies to the Universe , Institut Teknologi Bandung (2020)

Conferences / Talks / Posters

1.  Physics Speaks: Buntala (It's turtles all the way down: lessons we can derive from cosmology), Ateneo LeaPs invited talk (2023) [slides]

2.  Ares – Simulating Type Ia Supernovae on Heterogeneous HPC Architectures, Supercomputing 2023 research poster (2023)

3. Turbulently-driven deflagration-to-detonation transition in near-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarfs

   • MIT Kavli Institute Brown Bag talk , invited talk (2022)

   • American Physical Society April Meeting , contributed talk (2022)

   • 22nd European Workshop on White Dwarfs , contributed talk (2022)

   • HPC Day at UMass Lowell , contributed poster (2022)

   • 242nd American Astronomical Society Meeting , contributed poster (2023)

   • LANL Center for Theoretical Astrophysics seminar, invited talk (2023)

4.  Late-Time Dynamical Friction Effects in finite Disks, UMass Dartmouth, invited talk (2021)

5.  Steady-state density perturbations induced by a point mass in a finite cylinder, Physics Society of the Philippines, contributed talk  (2020)

Publications 

Peer-reviewed Journal Article

1. D Kosakowski, MI Ugalino, R Fisher, O Graur, A Bobrick, HB Perets (2022) Using 44Ti Emission to Differentiate Between Thermonuclear Supernova Progenitors, arXiv, accepted to MNRAS Letters 

Peer-reviewed Conference Proceedings

1.  M. Ugalino, I. Vega (2020) Steady-state density perturbations induced by a point mass in a finite cylinder, SPP

2.  M. Ugalino, I. Vega (2018) Density perturbations in a collisional fluid induced by a particle on a slightly-eccentric orbit, SPP

Theses

1.  Dynamical friction effects on circular orbits immersed in a finite gaseous background, MSc Physics thesis (2020)

2.  Density perturbation induced by relativistic bodies in slightly-eccentric orbits, BSc Physics thesis (2018) 

SPP - Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas (Physics Society of the Philippines)