I am an astronomer/astrophysicist and an Associate Research Scholar at the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University in New Jersey. I develop software for the Rubin Observatory (formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope/LSST) as part of the Data Management team. Our group at Princeton is (partly) responsible for Data Release Production for Rubin Observatory, amongst other things. I am currently working on software and algorithms for modelling galaxies and other astronomical sources (stars). You can have a look at the code I’m writing and some results from it if you’re so inclined.

A Brief Bio

I was born in Romania and grew up in Toronto, Canada. I obtained my BSc in Computational Physics from the University of Waterloo, where I did a final year project with Mike Hudson studying the quenching of star formation in simulations of galaxy clusters. I completed my PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, running and analyzing computer simulations of mergers in galaxy groups alongside my advisors John Dubinski and Howard Yee. I was then a CAASTRO Postdoctoral Research Associate at ICRAR/UWA, where I worked on more simulations, some photometric galaxy modelling with Aaron Robotham & co., and modelling galaxy dynamics with Danail Obreschkow and the SAMI Galaxy Survey team. You can read a bit more about that work on my old website.

What I Do in Plain-er English

Galaxies are collections of millions to billions of stars orbiting each other from their collective gravitational attraction. Our own Milky Way galaxy is a prime example. I write software and develop new algorithms to measure the distribution of stars in galaxies from digital photographs (a.k.a. photometry) and to model how the stars orbit by measuring small shifts in galaxy spectra from the Doppler effect. If that last part doesn’t make sense, have a look at this video.

This Website

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