Leonard Elias Cornelius Romano

I am a doctoral researcher at the University Observatory Munich (USM), Garching, which I joined under through funding from the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence at Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU), Munich.

I am part of Dr. Manuel Behrendt’s PGN Group at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), a subgroup of Prof. Andreas Burkert’s Computational Astrophysics (CAST) group at USM.

My broad research interest is Computational Astrophysics. To be more specific, I work with numerical simulations to study the behaviour of galaxies and the environments they host.

For more about my academic history, check out my Curriculum Vitae.

If you want to reach out to me, feel free to write me an email at lromano [AT] usm.lmu.de or find me on GitHub and Google Scholar.

Education

University Observatory Munich | Garching, Germany

PhD in Astrophysics | Feb 2022 - Aug 2025 | PhD thesis

Technical University Munich | Garching, Germany

B.Sc. & M.Sc. in Physics (Nuclear-, Particle- & Astrophysics) | Oct 2016 - Nov 2021

Background

I am natively from the state of Bavaria in Germany. During my early years, I lived in and near Munich going to school in the suburbian town of Gröbenzell, where I lived until I went away for an exchange semester in Osaka in 2018, which motivated me to move out and establish my own place.

While I completed my (under-) graduate studies near my home town at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Garching, I gained most of my research experience from research that I did at Osaka University under the supervision of Prof. Kentaro Nagamine.
The Nuclear-, Particle- & Astrophysics program at TUM notably focuses mostly on particle physics, so I received an unusual amount of training on topics like path integrals, symmetry groups and field theories; considering that I ultimately ended up in astrophysics.

During the pandemic it became difficult to travel so I opted for a position for my Doctoral Studies at the USM Munich.

What Else?

When I’m not modeling supernova remnants or setting off in simulated galaxies, I like to keep things a bit more down to Earth. You might find me baking bread, swimming, playing lasertag, or hiking in the Bavarian Alps.
I also spend some of my free-time on side-projects such as untangling the mysteries of US-taxes from abroad or building an automatic converter between different microscope output formats – topics that tremendously helped my wife.