Biography

I grew up in Sheffield, England from 1979-1997, and went to Cambridge for my undergraduate degree, graduating in 2000 with a degree in Natural Sciences, specializing in geology. This included 6 weeks of field work, as part of a student-organized group, undertaking geological mapping in the Rocky Mountains of Montana in 1999, which was published in the proceedings of the Montana Geological Society. I then switched to astronomy for my masters degree at Sussex, and completed a PhD in astronomy, under the supervision of Dr. John Loveday, entitled Galaxy Types, Luminosity Functions, and Environment in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, from 2001-4. During the masters degree, my main project involved assigning galaxy morphologies using artificial neural networks, following the work done by Storrie-Lombardi, Lahav, et al. in Cambridge during the 1990s. I continued this work during the PhD, providing a convenient way to assign Hubble type morphologies (E, S0, Sa, Sb, etc.) to samples of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) much too large to classify manually by eye (complimentary to more recent work by the well-known Galaxy Zoo project). We then used these samples, and other galaxy properties, in a study of the bivariate galaxy luminosity function in the SDSS, and compared galaxy morphology and colour as a function of environment. We showed that colour is a stronger predictor of environment than morphology, in agreement with numerous other contemporary and more recent studies.

From Sussex, I moved in late 2004 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to take up a postdoctoral position under the supervision of Prof. Robert Brunner. A joint appointment between the Astronomy Department and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), this enabled me to continue to work with data mining techniques on large surveys, now concentrating on object classification within the SDSS, and photometric redshifts of quasars. Highlights included in 2006 performing classifications using decision trees on 143 million SDSS objects, the first such large-scale deployment on a survey dataset, the award as PI of a GALEX archival grant in 2006, and in 2008 showing that the use of full probability density functions in redshift allows one to virtually eliminate the presence of 'catastrophic failures' in the photometric redshifts of quasars, which had previously plagued these data. In 2008, I was invited by the International Journal of Modern Physics D to write a review of Data Mining and Machine Learning in Astronomy. I took up this offer, and it currently remains the most extensive published review of the subject. In late 2008, I was promoted to Research Scientist.

In mid 2009, I moved from Illinois to the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics (HIA) in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, to take up a position as Assistant Research Officer at the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC). Supervised by CADC head Prof. David Schade, I am the first ever postdoctoral member of their science staff. The aim is to use the facilities and datasets of CADC to produce good science, and interact with the more technical staff to provide the science-driven motivation that maximizes the usefulness to astronomers of the infrastructure they build and maintain. I currently mainly work on the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey, headed by Laura Ferrarese (a member of HIA), focusing on photometric redshifts, and the galaxy luminosity function. NGVS will measure the luminosity function to a magnitude of approximately M = -5, several magnitudes fainter than existing surveys of cluster environments, and will be the definitive measure of the LF for such and environment in the local universe, providing a baseline for numerous studies of galaxy properties and evolution.

From 1993 onwards, first at school and then at clubs and tournaments, I played Scrabble to a reasonable standard. I have been ranked in the top 50 in the world, participated in the 2005 and 2009 World Championships, and am a certified director for the North American Scrabble Players Association. Recently, I have been involved in producing material for their website that provides information on the international standard lexicon, used by countries outside North America, and which is becoming increasingly popular here. Scrabble provides a good escape from work, and I enjoy the combination of the real-world interest of the words, and the strategy and competition of a game. Other interests I have include motorsport, exercise such as the gym or hiking, various meetup groups in Victoria, travelling, especially road trips, and reading.