Alas, galaxies are not spheres.
My research is at the interface between Astronomy and Data Science.
I am especially interested in using statistical techniques and machine learning methods to explore large galaxy catalogs and learn something about the evolution of the Universe.
These are some of the things I am up to right now:
I am especially interested in using statistical techniques and machine learning methods to explore large galaxy catalogs and learn something about the evolution of the Universe.
These are some of the things I am up to right now:
- Use a combination of supervised and unsupervised techniques to develop improved indicators of gas-phase metallicity in galaxies;
- Use machine learning and deep learning (CNNs) methods to understand the relationship between galaxy spectra and their star formation histories (with Chris Lovell);
- Use Bayesian model selection to understand which star formation history models and dust extinction laws are favored by observation (with Andy Lawler);
- Develop machine learning models to separate Lyman Alpha Emitting galaxies from other emission line galaxies or contaminants in the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy eXperiment (HETDEX) survey data (with Faraz Chahili).
Pretty colors trace likelihood in this plot showing galaxy properties from VA, Vargas, Gawiser and Guaita 2012.
Understanding the physical properties of galaxies, such as stellar mass, star formation histories, dust content, redshift, and metallicity, through Spectral Energy Distribution fitting has been a major focus of my research for several years. I wrote two Markov Chain Monte Carlo code for SED fitting. I still use them but now they have tons of competitors (and that's a very good thing!), see the GalMC page.
Don’t have data yet? If you are planning a survey and would like to know how well you can constrain the physical properties of galaxies with your observations (or want to try out a few different ones and see which one works best), you are welcome to use GalFish.
For some of my most recent work on the correlation between photometric properties and gas-phase metallicity you can check out this paper.
I am a member of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy eXperiment (HETDEX) collaboration, which aims to use Lyman Alpha Emitting galaxies to study the behavior of Dark Energy at early times, when we don’t expect to see much of it (but then we weren’t expecting dark energy at all, so I am hopeful for surprises).
Don’t have data yet? If you are planning a survey and would like to know how well you can constrain the physical properties of galaxies with your observations (or want to try out a few different ones and see which one works best), you are welcome to use GalFish.
For some of my most recent work on the correlation between photometric properties and gas-phase metallicity you can check out this paper.
I am a member of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy eXperiment (HETDEX) collaboration, which aims to use Lyman Alpha Emitting galaxies to study the behavior of Dark Energy at early times, when we don’t expect to see much of it (but then we weren’t expecting dark energy at all, so I am hopeful for surprises).