I am a french PhD student working on galaxy evolution at Aix Marseille University and Columbia University.
I am passionate about science and tons of other things (life related).
My current research interests include both building astronomical instruments (UV spectroscopy,
detector characterization), and developing innovative and easy to use visualization and
image processing tools.
I have been working 3 years on the FIREBall experiment. This path finder mission aims at imaging 7 bilions-light-year away galaxies' circumgalactic medium. This region around galaxies, hosting important mechanisms regulating their replenishment in gas through inflows and outflows, is the keystone to understand how galaxies evolve, how they feed and breath to create stars and how they give back to the intergalactic medium the metals they have created. In order to understand these exchanges, the FIREBall instrument attempts to image the CGM in emission via specific spectral lines redshifted to 205nm for the close universe. The instrument is a balloon-borne 1m telescope coupled to an ultraviolet multi-object spectrograph designed to measure this emission from the stratosphere.
I had the chance to join the FIREBall team during the most intense and critical moment: two years before the flight. I was in charge of evaluating the instrument performance and participated to two AIT campaigns and two flight campaings. You can access my paper on 2018-flight performance here. The goal of imaging the circumgalactic medium at intermediate 0.7 redshift is to fill the gap between high and low redshift observations (MUSE, LARS) and pave the way for future orbital projects.
I am also interested in developping innovative and easy to use image processing and visualization tools and integrate them to SAOImage DS9 so that it brings the visualization software a step further by turning it into an image processing application that will make you earn previous time. During the last two years I have been implementing this tool in order to create the first python DS9 plugin that gathers a glimpse of all the possibilities that offers DS9 extensibility. You can find the documentation and exemples of pyDS9plugin here.
Send me an email or find me on LinkedIn.