I have been very fortunate to supervise and work with several BSc, MSc, and PhD students, as well as teach a few MSc courses. In addition to my own PhD and MSc students, I have been lucky enough to work with some extremely talented students through summer programs and workshops. Below is a list of the courses I’ve taught and assisted in, and a list of students with a brief description of what we’ve worked on together.
Individual Student Research Projects
Gabriela Lapa (2024-current): Gabriela has recently completed her MSc in astrophysics at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Gabriela has a broad background in stellar evolution, time series analysis methods, and machine learning techniques, which has led her to devise her own research project to build a machine learning model that takes time series and spectroscopic properties of stars and produces estimates for the evolutionary properties of stars in a fraction of a second.
Desmond Grossman (2023-current): Desmond is currently a PhD student at the IAC in Tenerife working on combining the asteroseismic and binary properties of pulsating red giant stars. Together, Desmond and I are trying to introduce the Mahalanobis distance as a metric for estimating the evolutionary properties of stars. The publication is currently in preparation.
Linhao Ma (Kavli Summer Program in Astrophysics ; Summer 2023): Currently a postdoc at Princeton, I met and worked with Linhao while he was a PhD student at CalTech during the 2023 Kavli Summer program in Astrophysics at MPA. Linhao and I worked on using data from the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission to quantify the time series behaviour of evolved, massive B-type supergiant stars, also known as Blue Super Giants (BSGs). In the publication led by Linhao, we found and quantified a new signal in the periodograms of all the BSGs in our sample which may provide a window into the properties of sub-surface convective zones in these stars.
Tom Wagg (Kavli Summer Program in Astrophysics ; Summer 2023): Tom is a PhD student at the University of Washington working on things largely unrelated to asteroseismology, however, in the summer of 2023, Tom and I published pioneering work on the asteroseismic signatures of stars that have undergone episodes of mass transfer. It was delightful to teach Tom about asteroseismology and watch him take ownership of the project, successfully leading it to a publication.
PhD Theses:
- Princy Tahina (2021-2025). Joint PhD student at Radboud University (Nijmegen, NL) and KU Leuven (Leuven, BE). Princy is a PhD student working on developing statistical and machine learning methods for combining multiple (and often heteroskedastic) sources of time-series data of stars from independent telescopes. The aim of Princy’s work is to better combine independent data to aid in the time-series modelling of variable stars.
- Luc IJspeert (2019-2024). PhD student at KU Leuven (Leuven, BE). Luc is an FWO Aspirant PhD fellowship recipient working on the general identification and characterisation of pulsating star and binary star signals in space based photometric data, i.e. TESS data using a combination of statistical methods, algorithm development, and machine learning techniques. Some of Luc’s work on identifying a sample of intermediate- to high-mass stars in eclipsing binaries has been published here!
MSc Theses:
- Lieven Govaerts (2021-2022). MSc Statistics student at KU Leuven (Leuven, BE). Lieven is a student in the Master of Statistics program who is working on developing flexible models using Gaussian Processes to describe various sources of ‘noise‘ in astronomical time-series. Successfully defended in June 2022.
- Aphiwe Bangiso (2021-2022). MSc Data Science student at The University of Cape Town (Cape Town, South Africa). Aphiwe has been tackling the difficult problem of building a Machine Learning classifier based on time series attributes to classify the different types of variable stars observed with the MeerLICHT six-filter telescope located at Sutherland Observatory in South Africa. Successfully defended in May 2022.
- Wout Piot (2019-2020). MSc Astronomy at KU Leuven (Leuven, BE). Wout successfully defended his MSc thesis in 2020 at KU Leuven. Wout’s work investigated statistical properties of circularization and synchronisation rates in a sample of eclipsing binaries observed by the Kepler space telescope. Successfully defended in June 2020.
MSc Research Projects: (1 semester; 3 ECTS)
- D. Petit, W. Elst, & P. Schillemans; R-mode Oscillations in subdwarf B stars (KU Leuven)
- S. Giarratana; The influence of rotation on gravity-mode pulsations (KU Leuven)
- N. Aimar; Spectroscopic characterisation of HD 165246 (KU Leuven, Université Paris-Saclay) ** This work has led to a recent publication!
- S. Rutten & P. Kuypers; Binary pulsators: Do pulsational properties correlate with binarity? (KU Leuven)
- R. Cleas & W. Piot; Mass determination of HD89948’s white dwarf companion (KU Leuven)
Teaching Experience:
- Introduction to observations of binary stars @ MPA
October 2024 - Instructor / Advisor at the 2023 Summer Program in Astrophysics @ MPA
- 2023 MESA Summer School (TA)
- 2022 ERASMUS+ Workshop on Binarity & Asteroseismology @ IAC, La Palma
- Asteroseismology (6 ECTS)
Autumn 2018, Autumn 2020
@ KU Leuven & Radboud University - Binary Stars (6 ECTS)
Autumn 2017
@ KU Leuven - Observational School (3 ECTS)
Autumn 2018
@ KU Leuven
Stellar-shenanigans 