About Me

I am a professor in the Department of Physics at Allegheny College, in my hometown of Meadville, Pennsylvania. I am a computational astrophysicist: my students and I use supercomputer simulations to figure out what happens when stars collide.

Education

I studied physics as an undergraduate at Princeton University, then went to graduate school in the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where I earned my M.S. and Ph.D. It was at Cornell that I started smashing stars together inside a computer, and I never really stopped.

Career

Before Allegheny, I taught physics and astronomy at Vassar College for eight years. In 2006, I had the rare chance to return home: I joined the faculty of Allegheny College in Meadville, the town where I grew up, and I am now a professor of physics here. Allegheny is an undergraduate institution, which means my research students are undergraduates: they run simulations, make discoveries, and appear as co-authors on our published papers.

Jamie Lombardi teaching physics at a chalkboard in an Allegheny College classroom — Teaching physics at Allegheny College.

Research

My research group uses hydrodynamic simulations to study collisions and mergers between stars, the exotic objects those collisions create, and close encounters between stars and black holes. The research page explains what we do, the simulations page has movies, and my publications list the full technical record.

Media

Visualizations from our simulations have appeared in the Discovery Channel program Cosmic Collisions and in two episodes of the History Channel series The Universe. The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics hosts two of my recorded research talks: one on SPH simulation codes and one on the light of merging stars. Space.com featured one of our simulations, showing how gas from a shredded star can nudge a pair of orbiting black holes into aligned spins (Kıroğlu et al. 2025).

Beyond physics

Ice formations in the Ice Caves at Cragsmoor, New York — Ice Caves, Cragsmoor, NY, 2004.

An 1852 civil record from Naples recording the abandonment and naming of the infant Maria Anna Armato — Naples, 1852: the record that gave my great-great-grandmother her name, “Maria Anna Armato.”

I have beautiful daughters named Lynnea and Abigail, and my wife Sheryl is a beautiful person too. Meadville has been good to all of us, and teaching in the town where I grew up remains one of the great pleasures of my life.

Some years ago my father, James Lombardi, and I caught the genealogy bug, and we spent many happy hours chasing our family through centuries-old Italian records. We traced the Lombardi line all the way back to Gregorio Lombardi in Mercogliano, Italy in the 1700s, and the deeper we dug, the better the stories got.

One story is of my great-great-grandmother, Maria Anna Armato. Born in 1852 in the Mercato quarter of Naples, she was left as a newborn at the city's foundling home, where abandoned infants were surnamed by the month they arrived: an A for January, a B for February, and so on down the year. Raised by nuns in a convent in Mercogliano, she was courted by Carlo Centrone through the fence as he passed, and when she was old enough they decided to marry.

Their children were among my great-grandparents who left for America: on my father's side, from Italy between about 1890 and 1910, and on my mother's side, several came from Scotland and Ireland around 1904 to 1913. If family history is your kind of fun too, I would love to hear from you: write me at jalombar at allegheny dot edu, and my dad and I will happily share what we know.