I grew up in London, and did my undergraduate studies there at Imperial College.
I completed my masters project in the Astroparticle group of the University of Hamburg.
Since July 2017 I've moved into multi-messenger astrophysics.
I did my PhD at DESY Zeuthen, supervised by
Anna Franckowiak.
I then spent three years as a postdoc at Caltech working with
Mansi M. Kasliwal.
Now I'm the Neil Gehrels Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at
JSI
, based at UMD/NASA Goddard.
I'm a member of two international scientific collaborations:
ZTF is an optical telescope on Palomar Observatory, CA, USA. ZTF images the entire northern sky every two nights, and hunts for newly-detected objects (transients) that appear between observations. ZTF has already discovered hundreds of supernovae, dozens of Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs), and many other exciting transients.
WINTER is a new infra-red telescope located at Palomar Observatory. WINTER saw first light in June 2023, and is now used to study the dynamic infra-red sky. WINTER helps us understand the properties of 'red' transients, especially those that might be dust-obscured. With WINTER we hunt for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves and neutrinos, and make new discoveries in a relatively unexplored wavelength.
My research interests include:
High-Energy Neutrinos: We don't know exactly where most high-energy neutrinos come from, but by observing the neutrino arrival directions with telescopes, we might be able to find out. With ZTF and WINTER, I have led many of our neutrino follow-up campaigns. We successfully identified two TDEs as probable neutrino sources.
Gravitational-Waves (GWs) + Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs): Observations of the first Binary Neutron-Star merger from LIGO revealed a spectacular kilonova AT2017gfo, detected with a variety of telescopes. With ZTF and WINTER we search for these kilonovae from the direction of GW/GRB triggers.
Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs): When unlucky stars passing close to supermassive black holes, the strength of tidal forces can rip the stars to shreds. This process is known as a Tidal disruption Event, and generates spectacular flares the light up the electomagnetic spectrum. In recent years, we have become increasingly adept at finding these TDEs in optical surveys.
Machine Learning and Big Data: We are in the era of big data, and time-domain surveys including ZTF and WINTER (and soon Rubin) detect vast numbers of candidate transients each night. I developed a novel classifier (tdescore) to analyse nuclear transients, and identify TDEs amongst the vastly more numerous contaminant AGN, stars and supernovae.
I am also enthusiastic about Science Communication and Outreach. I won the Zeuthen Science Slam (2018) and the first DESY-wide Science Slam (2019). I've also supported the annual International Cosmic Day and IceCube Masterclass outreach events for students.