I'm a researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center! I am the Director of the TESS Science Support Center, and I run the TESS General Investigator Program. I am also the lead for the Data Processing Center of the NASA Pandora Smallsat. I spend most of my time writing open source software and doing data driven astronomy research.
I worked for the NASA Kepler mission π°οΈπ as part of the Guest Observer Office until the mission closed out. My role at Kepler was to support science and help the community of scientists interested in exoplanet discovery! πͺ I was a core developer for the lightkurve
package. After Kepler, I have been funding my research through NASA ROSES grants, and I have been funding a small research group. You can see some of the work that myself and my group do here! We focus on how to use modern data analysis techniques to get the most out of NASA Kepler and TESS data.
I mostly am interested in astronomical data, and how to work with it. If you care about fitting models to data, you might be interested to read these materials I'm writing on linear algebra models for astronomers.
Some of my research areas include
- πͺπ exoplanet discovery (check out my new paper here)
- βοΈ extracting information about exoplanet atmospheres from HST! (work in prep, check out the repo here!)
- π» developing new data techniques for NASA survey missions π°οΈ (check out tess-backdrop and psf-machine, and my recent paper)
- π extracting color information from black and white telescopes (see my new paper here)
- βοΈ Modeling asteroid light curves!
You might be interested in these repos
- pandora-psf: A nifty tool for working with PSFs, including a cool sparse object for astronomy images.
- tesswcs: A tool to work out the World Coordinate System solution for the TESS spacecraft
- contaminante: A tool for finding the "optimum" aperture for a transiting planet
- vetting: A tool for vetting exoplanet candidates with a stand alone centroiding test
- psfmachine: A tool for fitting PSFs to Kepler data fast! (check out the profile of post-doc Jorge Martinez Palomera who is working with me on improving these tools)
I have some Opinions about how to write open source tools in astronomy, you can read some of these Opinions on my Astronomy Workflow tutorial page.