about
I grew up in Santa Barbara, California, and received a BA in Physics from Bard College in 2018. After a three year hiatus working in the tech industry, my heart told me that it was time to return to astronomy. I started my Ph.D. in 2021 at New Mexico State University, where I began extragalactic research with Dr. Moire Prescott. We engineered an open-source program that classifies high-redshift Lyman-alpha blobs using deep broadband imaging data. Our framework employs an image-moment-based ensemble machine learning engine followed by a deep learning convolutional neural network, and minimizes the need for human inspection. We achieved filtering capabilities of over 99% in a pilot study, in which we identified ~100 candidates out of a survey of over 2 million cataloged objects.
I'm also part of the NMSU Computational Astrophysics group led by Dr. Wladimir Lyra. We use supercomputers to study planet formation theory, constructing advanced 3D hydrodynamical models using the Pencil Code. We conducted radiative transfer calculations on the (sub)-mm thermal emission to calculate how much disk dust mass an observer estimates, finding that if the streaming instability is indeed driving dense dust filaments and planetesimal formation, then protoplanetary disk masses are severely underestimated by over an order of magnitude.
I'm involved in a variety of other interesting projects, see below to learn about my research interests.
Interests
Click on the images to learn about my current pursuits!
Tutorials
I post machine learning tutorials in the context of astronomy research, check them out here. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me.
When will we find Planet 9 —
the unseen planet in our solar system?
During my studies I met a fellow who told me with the utmost confidence that within the next decade a new planet would be discovered. Not an exoplanet, of which there were thousands already, but a planet in our own solar neighborhood.
Space news
Artificial intelligence and why astronomers
don’t look through a telescope anymore.
As a child I had the opportunity to utilize the two-meter Faulkes Telescope in Siding Spring, Australia. I remember it was a very thrilling experience seeing the telescope move via a live webcam. I would input sky coordinates, and over the course of a minute, the telescope would slowly tilt toward the object. I couldn’t wait to become an astronomer and spend countless nights at the actual telescope sites — Hawaii, Chile, Spain, these are all locations with powerful telescopes that I wished to use one day. But little did I know, the era of manual observations was coming to an end.
A Comet in Santa Barbara’s Astronomical World
One Saturday morning in the summer of 2012, 15-year-old Daniel Godinez catches the bus from his home in Goleta. With transfers and delays, he pieces together a two-hour circuitous ride to the Museum of Natural History. He walks along the empty parking lot shaded by ancient live oaks, past the enormous blue whale skeleton, through the adobe entrance, and cuts across the peaceful courtyard. Opening the door marked “Gladwin Planetarium,” he feels his way along a dark aisle toward the control booth with the awesome presence of the sky dome overhead. In less than an hour, the audience will begin filling the seats for the first show of the day; but now he is alone. This is Daniel’s moment; he is about to turn on the universe.
