benjaminpope Goto Github PK

• 😄 Pronouns: he/him
• 📫 How to reach me: email or Twitter @fringetracker

I'm a Lecturer in Astrophysics and DECRA Fellow at the University of Queensland. Before this I was a NASA Sagan Fellow at NYU, and I did my DPhil at Balliol College, Oxford.

I research extrasolar planets - planets around other stars - and focus on developing and applying new data science approaches for detecting and characterizing them.

Currently, I'm working on exoplanet direct imaging with JWST Aperture Masking Interferometry; a survey of naked-eye stars in Kepler, K2, and TESS, to search for transiting planets. I'm also interested in using radio astronomy to study planets' magnetic interactions with their host stars, and modelling radiocarbon in tree rings as a tracer of ancient solar activity.

Slides for my talks are available here.

I've contributed to a number of open-source packages for physics, such as

• dLux, a Jax & equinox library for differentiable, GPU accelerated physical optics
  • docs here!
  • papers at arXiv:2011.09780 and arXiv:2107.00952
  • dLux is a full rewrite of morphine, a physical optics simulation library forked from poppy using Jax for autodiff
• ticktack, a carbon box modelling library for analysing tree ring radiocarbon data
  • docs here
• halophot, a pipeline for extracting precise photometry from even very saturated K2 and TESS data
  • papers at arXiv:1708.07462 and arXiv:1908.06981
• keplersmear, a pipeline for Kepler and K2 using collateral 'smear' data to recover missing lightcurves of bright stars
  • papers at arXiv:1510.00008 and arXiv:1905.09831
• k2sc, a pipeline for calibrating K2 photometry using Gaussian Processes
  • paper at arXiv:1603.09167
  • docs here

I'm from Sydney, and did my undergrad at the University of Sydney. I completed my doctorate in 2017 at Oxford, and from 2017-20 was a NASA Sagan Fellow at the NYU Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and Center for Data Science.