Degree: Professor
Position: Associate Professor
Division: Astrophysics II (Warsaw)ORCID: 0000-0002-5987-5077
Office: 115
Phone: +48 223296115
E-mail: mig@camk.edu.pl
Mirosław Giersz is a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (NCAC) in Warsaw.
After defending his Ph.D., in which he focused on physical processes in globular clusters, at NCAC in 1989, he completed a three-year (1990-1003) postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Edinburgh. Further studies in the subject of globular clusters, using numerical simulations, took place at NCAC and contributed to his habilitation which he received in 1999. He was awarded a title of professor in 2020.
Many years of research activity of Prof. Giersz contributed to a large number of permanent international collaborations with scientists from, a.o. Czech Republic, Germany, Scotland, Sweden, USA and China. In addition to that, he is an active member of various associations, including the MODEST (Modeling and Observing DEnse STellar systems) project, of which he is also the founder. In the years 1998-2006, Prof. Giersz was the deputy director for general affairs at NCAC, in 1999-2003 he was the secretary of the Astronomy Committee at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), in 2012-2015 he was the administrative coordinator responsible for the implementation of the Research Service performed under the AstroGrid-PL project, and since 2015 he has been the chairman of the Intellectual Property Committee at NCAC.
Among Prof. Giersz's most important achievements is the creation of the MOCCA (MOnte Carlo Cluster simulAtor) code, which is an improved version of the Monte Carlo code and one of the most advanced codes to simulate star cluster evolution. The code has been continuously developed since 1996, and one of the most important collaborators involved in the building the first versions of the code was Prof. Douglas Heggie.
According to the Scopus database (Aug. 19, 2022), Prof. Giersz is an author and co-author of 91 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited more than 3 000 times. The link to his publications included by the service NASA ADS can be found here.
The research team led by Prof. Giersz, and closely cooperating with the research group of his longtime collaborator, Prof. Rainer Spurzem (University of Heidelberg and Chinese Academy of Sciences), includes his current as well as former doctoral students – Dr. Arkadiusz Hypki (CAMK PAN), Agostino Leveque and Lucas Hellström and Dr. Abbas Askar (University of Lund, starting next year Polonez BIS fellowship), Dr. Diogo Belloni (Federico Santa María Technical University). Dr. Grzegorz Wiktorowicz (CAMK PAN) also belongs to the group.