McKinley Brumback

McKinley studies the behavior of gas in the extreme magnetic and gravitational environment around neutron stars. She got her PhD from Dartmouth College where she studied warped accretion disks around bright X-ray pulsars using broad-band X-ray emission to model the disk behavior. She completed a postdoc at Caltech with Fiona Harrison and the NuSTAR group where she used data from both NuSTAR stray light and NICER to study the unstable accretion disk in SMC X-1. While at U-M she plans to investigate accreting X-ray pulsars using high resolution spectroscopy. Outside of work, McKinley can be found reading, playing video games, and doing dog agility with her rescue dog Theo.