Rate My Professor Adam Ingram

Dr. Adam Ingram is a Senior Lecturer in Astrophysics and Royal Society University Research Fellow at Newcastle University, within the School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics. He completed his PhD at the University of Durham in 2012, receiving the Royal Astronomical Society's Michael Penston Thesis Prize for the best astronomy PhD thesis in the UK that year. Ingram's career progressed with a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Amsterdam from 2012 to 2014, followed by an NWO Veni Research Fellowship at the same university from 2014 to 2017. In October 2017, he began a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford, moving to Newcastle University in October 2021 to continue the fellowship while assuming a lectureship, later promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Ingram's research employs X-ray observations and theoretical modeling to explore the accretion environments around black holes and neutron stars, focusing on extreme physics near event horizons, including object formation and growth mechanisms. His PhD work introduced a model explaining quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in X-ray brightness as arising from Lense-Thirring precession of the inner accretion disk, incorporating density fluctuations to account for quasi-periodicity; this model accurately reproduces observed QPO properties. Subsequently, he derived analytical formulas accelerating precession model computations by factors of 1000, enabling detailed comparisons with data. As a Veni fellow, Ingram developed novel techniques for iron line reverberation analysis, detecting wobbling line profiles consistent with precession in the black hole binary H 1743-322 using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR data. Current investigations leverage reverberation lags to constrain black hole masses and spin, alongside X-ray polarimetry from the IXPE mission to dissect disk-jet geometries. Ingram supervises PhD students advancing numerical simulations and observational techniques with NICER data. In 2024, he secured an ERC Starting Grant for the X-MAPS project, advancing polarimetric-spectral-timing studies of accreting black holes. With over 270 refereed publications, Ingram has profoundly shaped the understanding of compact object accretion dynamics.