The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) is proud to announce that one of the first Science Foundation Ireland funded Royal Society research fellowships in Ireland has been awarded to a former DIAS scholar, Dr Jonathan Mackey, currently working in the University of Cologne.

His website is http://hera.ph1.uni-koeln.de/~mackey/index.html. Jonathan will hold his fellowship in the School of Cosmic Physics where he will continue his work using high performance computing to simulate the extreme environments around the most massive stars in the Galaxy. One of his most recent works, published last year in the prestigious journal Nature (2014, vol 512, pp 282-285), provides for the first time a convincing explanation for the dense shell of gas observed around the giant star Betelgeuse and has important implications for the dynamical evolution of supernova remnants. His work will be supported by the strong links between DIAS and the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC).