Stellar-shenanigans

Teaching & Supervision

I have been very fortunate to supervise and work with several BSc, MSc, and PhD students, as well as teach a few MSc courses. Below is a list of the courses I’ve taught and assisted in, and a list of students with a brief description of their work.

PhD Theses:

  1. 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 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.
  2. 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. Some of Luc’s work on identifying a sample of intermediate- to high-mass stars in eclipsing binaries has been published here!

MSc Theses:

  1. 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 to describe various sources of ‘noise‘ in astronomical time-series.
  2. 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 classifying the different types of variable stars observed with the MeerLICHT six-filter telescope located at Sutherland Observatory in South Africa.
  3. 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 circularization and synchronisation rates in a sample of eclipsing binaries observed by the Kepler space telescope.

MSc Research Projects: (1 semester; 3 ECTS)

  1. D. Petit, W. Elst, & P. Schillemans; R-mode Oscillations in subdwarf B stars (KU Leuven)
  2. S. Giarratana; The influence of rotation on gravity-mode pulsations (KU Leuven)
  3. N. Aimar; Spectroscopic characterisation of HD 165246 (KU Leuven, Université Paris-Saclay) ** This work has led to a recent publication!
  4. S. Rutten & P. Kuypers; Binary pulsators: Do pulsational properties correlate with binarity? (KU Leuven) 
  5. R. Cleas & W. Piot; Mass determination of HD89948’s white dwarf companion (KU Leuven)

Teaching Experience:

  1. Asteroseismology (6 ECTS)
    Autumn 2018, Autumn 2020
    KU Leuven & Radboud University
  2. Binary Stars (6 ECTS)
    Autumn 2017
    KU Leuven
  3. Observational School (3 ECTS)
    Autumn 2018
    KU Leuven