About

Greetings!

My name is Anastasios, but you can call me Andy. I am 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.

I am a third-year Astronomy Ph.D. student at the University of Washington. Currently, I work under Professor Eric Bellm and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory data commissioning team with a focus on time-series analysis and transients by writing and evaluating period-finding algorithms that will be implemented in the alert production of the forthcoming of the Rubin Observatory. I’m also an active member of the DiRAC institute at the University of Washinton under Professor James Davenport on the discovery of novel stellar variables in large time-domain surveys.

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. Currently I am the outreach program coordinator for the UW Plenetarium.

If you would like to read more about me, please click here for my CV.