Assistant Professor
Michigan State University
Biomedical-Physical Sciences Building 567 Wilson Rd., Room 3250 East Lansing 48823 MI United States
wkerzendorf@gmail.com
Supernova remnants are sites of former explosion with roughly 300 of them found in our own Milky Way. I search for surviving companions in these remnants - which can tell us about the evolution of the exploded star. The vicinity can also tells us about the type of star exploded.
Supernova spectra and their evolution contain a lot of information about the explosion and the progenitor star. TARDIS calculates synthetic spectra of supernovae given a model of the explosion. We then tweak the model until the synthetic spectra match the observations to infer the parameters of the exploded star.
Around the millions of solar mass black-hole at the center of our Galaxy there is a star cluster. Are these stars born near there? Did they originate somewhere else and migrated there?
An important step to learning from observations is to compare them with simulations. However, many simulations are too expensive and have too many free parameters to directly compare. Emulators are machine learning constructs (we use Gaussian Processes and Deep Neural Networks) that allow to emulate a simulator at a fraction of the computational cost and allow for comparison with observations.
Spectral data taken at the telescope comes in the form of a 2D image. My research tries to use data science techniques and physical models to extract well-calibrated 1D spectra from the raw data.
Astrometry extracts the movement of stars (proper motion) from image time-series. The different weather, intrinsic distortions in the imager, and image artifacts make this process very complex. I am researching a technique that uses well measured proper motion of stars to find a data driven way to infer astrometry.
A usual way to find papers with related ideas is to follow the citations in the paper and references to the paper. I am researching methods to find similar paper using the content - an implementation can be found at DeepThought search
While ancient scientist often have patrons to fund their work, peer review of proposals for the allocation of resources is a foundation of modern science. I research methods to identify experts to evaluate proposals and paper manuscripts. The first experiment was conducted at the European Southern Observatory and the result can be found here.