Rate My Professor Andrew Young

Dr Andrew Young is an Associate Professor in the School of Physics at the University of Bristol, part of the Faculty of Science. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His academic interests center on high energy astrophysics and X-ray astronomy. X-rays are produced by extremely hot gas in extreme environments, including gas falling into black holes, the centres of active galaxies, jets, outflows, and clusters of galaxies. Young studies these systems using images and spectra from space-based X-ray observatories such as Chandra, XMM-Newton, Suzaku, and NuSTAR. His research also encompasses numerical and observational astrophysics focused on accreting black holes, including the development of general relativistic models for time-dependent spectra of accretion flows with various disc, corona, and spacetime geometries.

As Principal Investigator, Young leads projects including "Time-domain Analysis to study the Life-cycle and Evolution of Supermassive black holes" (2025-2028) and "Bristol Open-source Relativistic Gravity" (2024-2027). He supervises PhD students such as Darius Michienzi, Gloria Raharimbolamena, Shashanth Sriramanathan (primary), and Tom Higginson, Yara Simango (co-supervisors), primarily in extragalactic astronomy. His research areas include active galaxies and black holes, high-performance scientific computing and AI, and observational astrophysics. He has produced 91 research outputs, mainly articles. Notable publications include "Evidence of mutually exclusive outflow forms from a black hole X-ray binary" (Nature Astronomy, 2026), "GRADUS.JL: spacetime-agnostic general relativistic ray-tracing for X-ray spectral modelling" (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2026), and "Modeling Reflection Spectra of Super-Eddington X-Ray Sources" (The Astrophysical Journal, 2026).