I am an astrophysicist and lecturer here at UTS. My research portfolio is a combination of big-data, high performance computing, image processing, mathematics and statistics which are currently applied to leading-edge applications in astrophysical research.

Exploring the time-domain is one of the new frontiers in astrophysics, but it comes at the burden of overwhelming data volumes (i.e. petabytes per year). Over the past 10 years, I have been conducting research to explore the time-domain properties of the Universe using a variety of techniques from supercomputing (Linux, Python, qsub, GitHub), databases (Pandas, SQL, Django, Apache), data visualisation (MatLab, Scipy, Seaborn) to advanced time-series analysis (state space modelling, regression, classification). The end game of this research is to alert the astronomical community, in real time and unaided by humans, to explosive objects in the Universe and to automatically trigger observations on ground- and space-based observatories. Particular objects that interest me at the moment are: Gravitational Wave Afterglows, Gamma-ray Bursts, Fast Radio Bursts, Pulsars, Interstellar scintillation, disk jet coupling in black holes systems (both stellar and supper-massive), space weather and space junk, Flare Stars (in particular Proxima Centauri) and my favourite active galaxy NGC 7213.

In previous positions I have been a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) and CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science division. I was part of the team constructing and commissioning the multi-million dollar telescope The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), which is a precursor to the multi-nation mega-science telescope The Square Kilometre Array (https://www.skatelescope.org). Prior to this I worked on the Murchison Widefield Array telescope where I conducted a multi-year survey searching every supermassive black hole detectable in the entire Southern hemisphere for significant variability. The backbone of this search relies on using complex data-science techniques to wrangle the peta-scale datasets to search for a statistical needle in a cosmic haystack (as it were).

My PhD thesis was entitled “The Low-Frequency Array and the transient and variable radio sky” completed under the supervision of Prof Rob Fender (now at Oxford University). The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) is the largest connected radio telescope ever constructed, with stations in five European countries. With this telescope I developed algorithms and techniques for automated imaging of data to search in real-time for deep space transient objects in enormous datasets. The aim of which was/is to study the inflow and outflow of material falling onto supermassive black holes to understand the correlations between the time-series signatures across the spectrum.