Intro

Hello! I am a scientist with a strong background in math, statistics, programming, and technical communication. I honed these skills as an astrophysicist and during my Master's degree in Physics at UC Davis, alongside my dual-Bachelor's in Physics and in Astronomy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (go blue!)

While Astrophysics has long been a passion of mine, I have always been intrigued by using data-driven methods to glean insight the many processes in our world.

In physics, we use models derived from the laws the govern reality to converge on a solution, and extract insights from large collections of data. This makes data science and quantitative analytics a natural fit for my background, and I now seek to expand this knowledge-generating process into industry.

Research

Elemental Abundances of Simulated Low-Mass Galaxies

For research, I previously focused on the elemental abundances of stars in low-mass ('dwarf') galaxies simulated using FIRE-2.

In my most recent project, I identified the 'elemental abundance trends', measured in [Mg/Fe] versus [Fe/H], of several galaxies.

I found imprints of bursty star formation and satellite accretion in the present day elemental abundance distributions. These features could be resolved in nearby dwarf galaxies through upcoming spectroscopic surveys like JWST and the ELTs.

This work culminated in a first-author publication, accepted by MNRAS in March 2022. The paper can be found on ArXiv or downloaded below.

My final project involved the new 'age-tracer' module in FIRE-2 and FIRE-3, which allows one to retroactively test multiple models in rates for core-collapse supernovae (CCSN), type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), and stellar winds. In doing so, one can see the direct effect on elemental abundances within a galaxy without needing to re-run a simulation with altered models. This unique addition to the simulation space will allow models of stellar nucleosynthesis to be bridged with simulations of galaxy evolution for the first time, ushering a new generation of research connecting the history of stars with the history of galaxies. Importantly, it will allow us to place new constraints on the production of elements throughout the universe, and can be expanded to include s-process and r-process elements as well.

Graphics

Animations

Here are some of my recent forums-signatures. As you can see, I've managed to make them web-safe and transparent.

Older Animations

Links

Not too many of these, but feel free to check out my DeviantArt for some of my older space art. More in progress as we speak!

About Me

Former Astrophysicist with a long time passion in graphic design. I spent years trying to figure out how to make GIFs transparent, as it typically looks clunky and and lacks smoothness when you try. This is due to the inability of the GIF file format to handle partial alpha values - it's either transparent or it's an opaque pixel. Certain techniques can circumvent this issue (dithering, matching the background of your target webpage), but this reduces the flexibility of animated images by preventing them from being viable on all webpages. You either have to get the designer to change the background color, or deal with transparency that just looks worse than it did in After Effects. While I have found some partial solutions using Python and PIL (Pillow), they lack the overall aesthetic benefit of just using the same colored background, and don't look great if the BG color changes too much.

Recently, I figured out that WebP has been adopted by all major browsers (circa 2019) as a modern alternative to the GIF format. It works on phones, it works on mac, it works on PC, and as long as you're not running extremely old software, it works for you too. WebP animations will not work off of browsers, so the animation is on, say, Discord, then it won't work for the time being and we have to resort to traditional GIFs. The upside is that you can just default to using the discord background color.

It seems there is a huge dearth in animations that take advantage of this, and I'm ready to corner to market on transparent animations to help creators and businesses stand out from the rest of the crowd, whether it be on their advertisements or in their profiles. If you'll have me, I'll work with you to take your graphics to the next level too. There are free alternatives to taking PNG sequences and making WebP animations (EzGif for example), but they are not built for graphic design and sometime fall short. I can custom tailor the process with an artists' touch (for a very small fee).