Personal profile

Personal profile

I am an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Astronomy at UIUC. I work at the intersection of time-domain astrophysics, cosmology, AI and statistics. I study the Universe with stars that blow up, like to find fast, faint, bright, lensed, recurrent and otherwise peculiar transients, and my group did much of the pioneering work to use artificial intelligence in astrophysics, particularly for time-domain analysis.

I serve as Deputy Director for Astrophysics Research at the NSF-Simons SkAI Institute in Chicago, and Deputy Director of the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys. I am also a Simonyi NSF-CAREER Fellow, Analysis Coordinator of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC), co-PI of the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), and PI of the Scalable Cyberinfrastructure for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (SCIMMA) team.

I deeply value the mentor-mentee relationship and work with several students, undergraduates and graduates alike, postdocs and research scientists. I think we are privilged to study the cosmos, and am deeply committed to public outreach. When I'm not working, you can find me hiking, or behind a camera lens.

If you'd like to get in touch, shoot me an email, or swing by my office - always happy to get a cup of coffee.

Research Interests

Cosmology
Time-domain Astrophysics
Survey Science
Multi-messenger Astrophysics
Statistics
Data Science
Machine learning
Supernovae

Professional Information

My research interests lie at the intersection of multi-messenger and time-domain astrophysics, cosmology, statistics and data science. I work on wide-field surveys developing machine learning (particularly neural network-based) methods for real-time detection and classification of variable and transient sources, Bayesian models for cosmological inference with type Ia supernovae, and establishing an all-sky network of faint spectrophotometric standards for LSST, NGRST and future projects.

I am Analysis Coordinator for LSST's Dark Energy Science Collaboration (formerly deputy Analysis Coordinator and convener of the Time Domain Working Group), co-PI of the Young Supernova Experiment. I am also a PI of the SCiMMA Team (https://scimma.org). I've been a member of the Pan-STARRS, ESSENCE, Foundation, MzLS, SIRAH, and RAISIN surveys, among others.

Office Address

1002 W. Green Street, Rm. 129,
Urbana, IL 61801

Office Phone

Education/Academic qualification

Physics, Ph.D., Harvard University

Award Date: May 30 2013

Physics, B.S. (Hons), Illinois Wesleyan University

Award Date: Jun 5 2007

Keywords

  • QB Astronomy
  • cosmology
  • supernovae
  • multi-messenger astrophysics
  • dark energy
  • kilonovae
  • survey science
  • deep learning
  • artificial intelligence
  • machine learning
  • data analysis

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