Prof. Rainer Spurzem

Rainer Spurzem is a senior astrophysicist at the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut of the Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg (ARI/ZAH) and concurrently holds positions at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC/CAS) and the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University (KIAA/PKU).

His research specializes in direct N-body simulations of dense stellar systems, galactic nuclei with supermassive black holes, relativistic stellar dynamics, and parallel many-core and GPU-accelerated computing. With Sverre Aarseth he was among the first to simulate the core collapse of a star cluster using a direct N-body algorithm on a Cray supercomputer. He leads the Silk Road Project, a long-running collaboration network in computational astrophysics linking Germany, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other partner countries.