About Me

Greetings!

My name is Anastasios, but friends and colleagues call me Andy. I’m an incoming DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington, where I study how planets form through stellar variability of young stars. I’m a Greek-American astronomer from Crete, and my path through astronomy has been shaped by a love of discovery, storytelling, and public engagement.

My academic interests include how modern sky surveys can reveal rare and unexpected astrophysical phenomena. My work combines time-domain astronomy, stellar variability, statistical methods, and large-scale survey data to study stars and their environments across the Milky Way. I’m particularly drawn to unusual variable stars, long-duration dimming stars, and systems where circumstellar material may encode clues about stellar and planetary evolution. Alongside my research, I am passionate about science communication as a tool to make astronomy more accessible to the general public.

I recently earned my Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Washington. During my Ph.D., I was co-advised by James Davenport and Eric Bellm, along with many wonderful collaborators. My dissertation focused on discovering and characterizing rare stellar variability in large photometric surveys, especially unusual dimming events that reveal the presence of circumstellar material around stars. Using data from Gaia, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), WISE/NEOWISE, and other time-domain surveys, I studied long-duration eclipses, main-sequence “dipper” stars (i.e., Boyajian Star analogs), and other unusual dusty young stars. This work included the discovery of Gaia17bpp, a giant star that underwent a deep, multi-year dimming event likely caused by an optically thick disk transiting the star, as well as a systematic ZTF search for main-sequence dipper stars and work on Gaia-GIC-1, a candidate planet collision afterglow. I also contributed to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s data commissioning and alert production effort through work on time-series analysis and period-finding algorithms for Rubin alert streams. More broadly, my Ph.D. work used modern time-domain surveys to connect rare stellar variability with circumstellar material, planet formation, and the evolution of stellar and planetary systems.

Prior to my graduate studies, I held a two year post-baccalaureate research position at the California Institute of Technology affiliated with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey under Professor Mansi Kasliwal. At Caltech, I was a co-leader for a volume-limited supernovae experiment called the ZTF Census of the Local Universe (CLU). The ZTF CLU experiment is a systematic supernovae study that aims to classify and characterize all supernovae within 200 Mpc using data from the ZTF survey. I also held responsibility for allocating time for rapidly fading and low-luminosity transients using the Palomar P-60”, Palomar P-200”, and the Keck-I telescopes to obtain medium/high-resolution spectroscopy. The ZTF CLU experiment to date is one of the largest volume-limited supernovae samples.

In 2019 I earned my Bachelors’s degree in astronomy from Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia, my primary research was conducted in the field of Galactic Archeology, mapping the shape of the Milky Way’s disk using data from all-sky astronomical surveys under Professor Kathryn Johnston and Professor Allyson Sheffield. I also had the amazing opportunity to intern at NASA Ames Research Center with the Kepler Guest Observer Office where I fell in love with the application of open-source software development in science. At NASA I was a contributor to the open-source python package lightkurve where I wrote python tools for processing astrophysical time-series data from the Kepler space telescope.

Outside of academia, I enjoy photography (you can see some of my work here), surfing, cooking, and science communication. I was the the former director for the UW Planetarium.

For more information please see my CV here.