I am an astronomer at the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. I specialize in measuring the growth of galaxy clusters over time in order to constrain the dark energy equation of state. 

The tools that I use in my daily research are Python, Astropy, and MongoDB. Please feel free to contact me LinkedIn if you have any questions about my research.

CURrent location

Taipei, Taiwan

Interests

Cycling, Dragonboat Racing, Languages

I was born and grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. In high school, I participated in Science Olympiad and Quiz Bowl. These activities gave me an outlet to pursue my interests in science and math, and I'm enormously grateful to the teachers that gave their time to make our team win several national competitions. 

I've always been interested in other cultures. My mom is from Germany and my dad is from the Czech Republic. As a kid, I lived for several years with my family in Europe. After college, I spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow in Minsk, Belarus, where I performed research at the Institute for Molecular and Atomic Physics.

In college, I became interested in quantum mechanics and quantum optics. Part of my research involved building and operating various types of lasers, including: Ti:Sapphire, Pulsed Fiber, He:Ne, and Diode. For one project, I built a diode laser from scratch and locked its frequency to an atomic transition. 

In graduate school, I worked on a special new kind of superconducting detector, called a microwave kinetic inductance detector. These detectors are special because they allow multiple signals to be read out using a single feedline. There's an image of how one of these devices looks like below.  

At the end of graduate school, I became more interested in astronomy and big data. That's what brought me to Asia.... See a summary of the types of projects that I'm currently working on below. 

NoSQL MongoDB Galaxy Cluster Database

I have constructed a noSQL MondoDB database for published galaxy cluster parameters. Given the structured nature of this information, I found it more intuitive to have a document-based database, which led me to building the database using a noSQL platform. I found that pymongo has one of the easiest to install Python packages with a lot of functionality. 

Modelling Astronomical Biases in linear regression

One of the problems with fitting astronomical data is that we can often only fit the brightest data, so our measurements are a biased representation of the underlying population. Faint objects vastly outnumber bright objects, and therefore the typical Gaussian methods that used in fitting will not work. I developed code that takes into account these astronomical biases in a  self-consistent way.

Characterizing the Angular Extent of Bright-Star Halos

For astronomical CCD data, a super bright star can often make it to detect and analyze the faint data that we are usually interested in. I have developed a code in order to characterize the angular extent of a bright star halo using python and machine-learning soft

The code for this database project can be found here.

The code for this statistics project can be found here.

The code for this two-point correlation project can be found here.

Password-protected notes on my analysis specific to the HSC Survey are here.