Biography
I am currently a tenure-track researcher and NWO WISE Fellow at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, where I do research at the interface of astronomy and data science. I am also a Data Science fellow at the eScience Institute of the University of Washington.
I am particularly interested in how we can use modern statistical tools and machine learning methods to learn about the universe. With my students and collaborators, I currently work on a diverse range of topics, including period detection in asteroids and solar flares, statistical machine learning for outlier detection and Approximate Bayesian Computation for understanding systematic effects in X-ray telescopes.
Within SRON as well as in my role as an organizer of Astro Hack Week, I am very interested in how we can facilitate communication and collaboration both within and between scientific communities, and how we can help scientists learn and use modern data science methods. A paper on that topic in the context of hack weeks as a model of data science education and collaboration was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I currently co-lead (with Anthony Arendt at the UW eScience Institute) a project funded by the Sloan Foundation to design and evaluate interventions for virtual participant-driven events like hack weeks and unconferences.
Previously, I was the Associate Director for the DIRAC Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle, after three years as a Moore-Sloan Data Science Fellow at New York University's Center for Data Science. Before that, I completed a PhD thesis on magnetar bursts with Anna Watts and Michiel van der Klis at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy of the University of Amsterdam.