Research

Listed on this page are brief descriptions of many of the research projects I am interested in at the moment. Please click on the links to find more information on any of them

Software

Sersic fitting for the 2020’s and beyond

I am a co-lead developer of pysersic, a new Bayesian implementation of a old method. Parameteric profile fitting is a stable in extragalactic astronomy to study the morphology of galaxies, and there are many codes designed to do so. The benefits of pysersic are that is is written fully in python, utilizing jax for faster execution, ability to run on GPUs and gradient tracking. We utilize gradient information so for lightening quick Bayesian inference.

We designed pysersic to be simple to use but still customizable were necessary! All the development is hosted on github. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or issues!

Moving beyond the Sersic profile

I am interested in novel data analysis techniques, specifically those focused on measuring galaxy morphology. I developed imcascade, which utilizes a series of Gaussians to be more flexible then traditional Sersic fitters and better represent realistic galaxies. imcascade works great for galaxies for images taken with space telescope where there is complicated structure but the PSF is still important

Thesis projects

Using color gradients to understand galaxy growth

The colors of a galaxies contain a multitude of information about their formation history. However galaxies are known to have radial gradients in the colors, indicating complex multi-component formation histories. In my thesis I have the evolution of color gradients in galaxies to gain new insight into their formation pathways.

How to define the size of a galaxy?

The sizes and structures of different types of galaxies serve as important tools to investigate their formation. While the size of a galaxy is a crucial characteristic, however it is not a well defined property. First of all there is no unique definition of size, most people use the radius that contains half of the light. Additionally what wavelength you are looking at greatly affects the morphology. My thesis has focused on better investigating these two assumptions and what affects they had on the conclusions we draw

Past Work

In the past I have worked on other exciting research projects. In my first year at Yale I studied the dynamics of sub-halos using numerical simulations. During my B.Sc and M.Sc, I focused on sub-mm galaxies; intensely active and massive galaxies in the early universe.

During my thesis I was part of the team operating the Dragonfly telephoto array; a specialized telescope built to study the low-surface brightness universe. I have focused on studying the outskirts of massive galaxies using Dragonfly.