Postdoctoral Researcher @ EPFL

Astronomy & Planetary Sciences

About

I am a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) Institute of Physics, working with Prof. Richard Anderson in his Standard Candles and Distances group. My research is centered around the Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope (WST), an innovative 12-m class spectroscopic facility.

Prior to that, I completed my PhD in astronomy and planetary sciences under the supervision of Prof. Shay Zucker, as part of Prof. Tsevi Mazeh's research group.

I am interested in advanced astronomical data analysis, mostly for the purpose of variability analysis and planet detection, and I work primarily with spectroscopy, utilizing state-of-the-art statistical methods and tools.

I am an active member of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) and the TESS Follow-up Observing Program (TFOP).

publications

WST — The Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope

WST will address many open questions in astrophysics over an extensive range of physical scales: from the formation of the large-scale structures in the early universe, to the interplay of galaxies in the cosmic web, to the formation of our own Galaxy, to the evolution of stars and the formation of planets around them.

In the figure: WST facility design. Credit: G. Gausachs / WST

Research Interests

My research centers around the planned Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope (WST), where I focus on variability and time-domain analysis in astronomical spectroscopy. I work on periodicity detection in astronomical data, mostly spectra, with applications such as analysis of stellar pulsation modes, binary stars characterization, star-planet interactions, and exoplanet detection in the presence of stellar activity.

As a Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) member, I developed several model-independent and deep-learning-based tools to analyze the unique Gaia spectroscopic, astrometric, and photometric data. I am also interested in applying tools I have developed and state-of-the-art methods to exoplanet detection, and I work on bulk exoplanet detection in various survey databases.

I am a TESS Follow-up Observing Program (TFOP) member, working on the Gaia-TESS collaboration, optimizing the ESA-NASA missions data integration to enhance exoplanet detection efforts.

The SPARTA Code Library

Publicly available SPectroscopic vARiabiliTy Analysis python tools

The SPARTA library for SPectroscopic vARiabiliTy Analysis is a collection of tools designed to analyze periodically-variable spectroscopic observations.

The library is written in Python. It is easy to install and includes multiple example notebooks and tutorials.

It includes our user-friendly implementation for the PDC periodograms:
multiple model-independent tool for periodicity detection in photometric, spectroscopic, or astrometric time series.

Developed with Dr. Sahar Shahaf.

News

Press coverage for various projects by past and current research groups