Krzysztof Nalewajko

Krzysztof Nalewajko's photo

Degree: Ph.D.

Position: Associate Professor

Division: Astrophysics II (Warsaw)

ORCID: 0000-0002-2019-9438

Office: 128

Phone: +48 223296128

Personal website: http://users.camk.edu.pl/knalew/


E-mail: knalew@camk.edu.pl

Krzysztof Nalewajko is an associate professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) in Warsaw


He was the winner of the XLIV Astronomical Olympiad (2001), studied astronomy at the University of Warsaw as part of the Inter-faculty Individual Studies in Mathematics and Natural Sciences (MISMaP), then did his doctoral studies at NCAC, where he defended his dissertation entitled "Reconfinement Shocks in Jets of Active Galaxies" under the supervision of Prof. Marek Sikora in 2011. He then moved to the USA, where he worked at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 2013, he was awarded a prestigious NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out the project 'Understanding Gamma-Ray Flares of Blazars' supporting the mission of the ‘Fermi’ gamma-ray space telescope by analyzing data from the Fermi/LAT instrument including the brightest blazar flares and theoretically investigating the magnetic reconnection process and instabilities in relativistic jets of blazars. In the first year, this project was carried out at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he worked with Prof. Mitchell Begelman and Prof. Dmitri Uzdensky, and then it was transferred to the Stanford University, where he worked with Prof. Grzegorz Madejski and Prof. Roger Blandford. He obtained his habilitation in 2017.


According to the Scopus database (Aug. 26, 2022), Prof. Nalewajko is an author and co-author of 59 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited almost 2 500 times. The link to his publications included by the service NASA ADS can be found here.


Prof. Nalewajko is currently supervising doctoral students Qiang Chen and José Ortuño-Macías. He also supervised postdocs Dr. Varadarajan Parthasarath and Dr. Krzysztof Hryniewicz.


Research interests
  • blazars, radio galaxies,
  • gamma-ray bursts,
  • relativistic jets, non-thermal emission,
  • polarization, particle acceleration, shock waves,
  • reconnection of magnetic fields,
  • plasma instabilities, kinetic plasma simulations.

Grants / Scientific projects
Dr. Nalewajko is/was a principal investigator in the following projects:
  • "Applying magnetic reconnection to relativistic jets" (2022-2024). Funding information: OPUS project, NCN (2021/41/B/ST9/04306),
  • "Kinetic simulations of instabilities in relativistic plasma" (2016-2023). Funding information: SONATA BIS project, NCN (2015/18/E/ST9/00580),
  • "Understanding Gamma-Ray Flares of Blazars" (2013-2015). Funding information: Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship (PF3-140112).