About Me

Greetings!

My name is Anastasios, but you can call me Andy. I’m passionate about the application of astrophysical discovery with telescopes using of modern data science and statistics. I also love to think about data visualization techniques to map and visualize complex and large volumes of astrophysical survey data. My current scientific interests are stellar populations, stellar variability, Galactic archeology, and broadly time-domain astronomy.

Currently, I’m a final-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, co-advised by Eric Bellm and James Davenport, and many wonderful collaborators. My research focuses on time-domain astronomy, particularly the discovery and characterization of rare and unusual stellar variability using large photometric surveys such as Gaia and the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey. I am a member of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s data commissioning and alert production team, where I contributed to the development and evaluation of period-finding algorithms as part of the Rubin alert production. I work closely with research scientists from the DiRAC Institute and the LINCC Frameworks on scalable methods for uncovering new classes of variable stars and exploring the role of circumstellar material around main-sequence stars. You can learn more about my work on my research page.

Previously, 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.