Astrophysics

I did my PhD at the University of Manchester (Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics) from 2013-2017. I then continued as a post-doc, applying machine learning techniques to astronomy problems, and now I work at the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) headquarters at Jodrell Bank. Feel free to reach out using any of my social profiles, or academic email found in my publications.

In general I use telescopes to observe galaxies and clusters. More recently I've been using machine learning to analyse data from astronomical surveys.

Some research highlights are shown below:

I used a supervised Random Forest to classify 111 million unlabelled sources in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). In the figure below I used a dimension reduction algorithm (UMAP) to visualise these classifications in a 2D space. You can click on the image to learn more about it.

We used the LOFAR telescope to observe the galaxy cluster Abell 1682

We found a new giant radio galaxy which I wrote a paper about, click below if you'd like some light reading :)

We discovered a spiral DRAGN! What is that?! It's a spiral galaxy (C) that is producing jets of material (A & B) originating from its supermassive black hole. Click to read about it!

Below is the spectacular galaxy cluster Abell 1132. The background is optical, blue is X-ray emission, and red is radio emission from LOFAR at 150 MHz. This is believed to be two galaxy clusters that are merging, giving rise to a wide range of emission across multiple wavelengths! You can read our paper about it by clicking the image.

Below is another merging galaxy cluster - Background image is an RGB optical image from HST. Cyan denotes the total mass distribution traced by lensing (dominated by the dark matter). Purple denotes the baryonic mass distribution (dominated by the ICM plasma). Red denotes the diffuse radio emission at 325 MHz. Click to read our paper about it :)

We looked at the Perseus cluster at low radio wavelengths to research the correlation between radio power and X-ray power that we see in galaxy clusters.

The super clever people working with LOFAR are developing advanced calibration algorithms so that we can produce some of the most ground-breaking astrophysical images to date: