Professor Matthew Browning

Overview

My primary research interests are in plasma astrophysics, computational fluid dynamics, and stellar astronomy. I am particularly interested in convection and magnetism in stars and planets: all stars harbor magnetic fields somewhere in their interiors, and those fields likely play a role in nearly every phase of stellar evolution. Similarly, many planets convect, and this convection can establish magnetic fields through dynamo action (alongside its importance for transporting heat and angular momentum).  Much of my research involves using three-dimensional simulations of fluids (aka "stars and planets") with and without magnetism, though I've also delved a bit into observational studies of stellar rotation and activity and into more idealized problems in fluid mechanics. Before coming to Exeter (as Lecturer) in 2011, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), in Toronto, and an NSF postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley (and concurrently at U. Chicago) before that. I did my doctoral work with Juri Toomre in Boulder (at JILA, within the University of Colorado), my undergrad at Rice (Houston, Texas), and grew up in West Virginia.

Over the last few years, I've been particularly interested in internally heated and cooled convection, where convection is driven by distributed heating and cooling profiles (typically to chosen to mimic those arising from, e.g., fusion in stars and radiative cooling near the photosphere).  In recent work we have shown that for at least some problems the answers we get in this setup are independent of the numerical diffusivities involved, allowing us to extrapolate to interesting (astrophysically relevant) regimes. 

Research group

My work has been supported primarily by STFC (the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council) and, in the past, by the European Research Council. (I held an ERC starting grant from 2013-2019.) Currently (mid-2026) I am working most closely with Soham Sanyashiv (current STFC-funded PhD student), Neil Lewis (formerly an STFC-funded postdoc in my group, now a Leverhulme Early Career fellow), Tom Joshi-Hartley (formerly a PhD student of mine, now a postdoc at CEA-Saclay), and my long-term collaborators Laura Currie (formerly a postdoc with us, now faculty at Durham) and Steve Tobias (Edinburgh).  I am also currently collaborating with colleagues in the US (Loren Matislky, Nic Brummell, Geoff Vallis) on projects involving Jupiter's zonal jets.  

I feel very fortunate to have been able to work in the past with some really talented people here at Exeter and elsewhere. A partial list of alumni: Felix Sainsbury-Martinez (former PhD student, now postdoc at Leeds); Lewis Ireland (former PhD student, now permanent staff at the Met Office); Simon Lance (former PhD student, now in the private sector), Tom Joshi-Hartley (former PhD student, now at CEA-Saclay). Some former postdocs include Maria Weber (later an NSF AAPF in the US, now faculty and planetarium director there), Lucia Duarte (later at Max-Planck), and Laura Currie (Durham).

Some selected papers (recent and/or significant)

Matilsky et al. 2026, submitted, "Superrotation and Jet Migration in Simulations of Jupiter’s Convective Zone and Weather Layer" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.23307

Lewis et al. 2026, "Diffusion-free Dynamics in Rotating Spherical Shell Convection Driven by Internal Heating and Cooling," Astrophysical Journal, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026ApJ...998...52L/abstract

Kapyla et al. 2023, "Simulations of Solar and Stellar Dynamos and their theoretical interpretation,"

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023SSRv..219...58K/abstract

Currie, Barker, Lithwick, Browning (2020), "Convection with misaligned gravity and rotation: simulations and rotating mixing length theory," https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020MNRAS.493.5233C/abstract

Ireland & Browning 2018, "The radius and entropy of a magnetized, rotating fully-convective star: analysis with depth-dependent mixing length theories," Astrophysical Journal, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018ApJ...856..132I/abstract

Brun & Browning 2017, "Magnetism, dynamo action, and the solar-stellar connection," in Living Reviews in Solar Physics http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017LRSP...14....4B

Currie & Browning 2017, "The magnitude of viscous dissipation in strongly stratified two-dimensional convection," in Astrophysical Journal Letters, 845, L17 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017ApJ...845L..17C

Browning et al. 2016, "Theoretical limits on magnetic field strengths in low-mass stars," in the Astrophysical Journal, with Maria Weber, Gilles Chabrier, and Angela Massey http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ApJ...818..189B

Weber & Browning 2016, "Modeling the rise of fibril magnetic fields in fully convective stars," in the Astrophysical Journal, with Maria Weber http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ApJ...827...95W

Duarte et al. 2016, "Helicity inversion in spherical convection as a means for equatorward dynamo wave propagation," with Lucia Duarte, Johannes Wicht, and Thomas Gastine, in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016MNRAS.456.1708D

Brown et al. 2011, "Magnetic Cycles in a Convective Dynamo Simulation of a Young Solar-type Star," with Ben Brown, Mark Miesch, A.S. Brun, and Juri Toomre http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ApJ...731...69B

Browning, 2008, "Simulations of dynamo action in fully convective stars," in the Astrophysical Journal http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008ApJ...676.1262B

Browning et al. 2006, "Dynamo Action in the Solar Convection Zone and Tachocline: Pumping and Organization of Toroidal Fields," in the Astrophysical Journal, with Mark Miesch, Allan Sacha Brun, and Juri Toomre http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006ApJ...648L.157B

Browning, Brun, Toomre 2004, "Simulations of Core Convection in Rotating A-Type Stars: Differential Rotation and Overshooting," in the Astrophysical Journal http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004ApJ...601..512B