The German SKA community! I’m delighted to be joining it in a month or so. #SKAO2025

Was swapping my dish scrub for a new one, and had this thought pop up:

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

Another funding opportunity is gone. NSF archived the the Career-Life Balance program which provided supplemental funding when researchers are on family leave. The small strides we had made toward improving representation in science are being undone so fast. new.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Definitely thankful to my supervisor for doing this though. It helped build the courage to eventually approach people myself. 😁

Sometimes you need to respond with a bang 😁

Found an old meme of mine from Twitter, and realised that the alt text was a little Easter egg of its own. Proud of past me for this!

i think about this a lot

Wrapping up on a busy 2024! From @astroai.bsky.social to @scienceacademyswe.bsky.social, and from Cosmo21, Radio 2024 to CCA @flatironinstitute.org, it's been a busy year of presenting results ranging from EoR 21-cm signal extraction with ML, to large-scale simulations, to plans of super-resolution.

The vibe I exude to my bluesky followers

Something I tried to emphasize to the Schmidt Foundation a couple of years ago is that one of the ways to intervene in this pattern is for foundations that give out scicomm awards to provide academic winners with research funding so universities see there is fiscal value in supporting scicomm

fantastic piece discussing the evolving role of scholars/scientists www.nationalacademies.org/news/2024/06...

Heading off to New York for the "Cosmology and galaxy astrophysics with simulations and machine learning" happening at CCA at @flatironinstitute.org! Lots of interesting science, and of course, Christmas festivities in the city to look forward to. 😁

An unfortunate event at any astro institute/department:

On a paper with both theorists and observers, I managed to annoy both! f_esc here represents the "escape fraction", or the fraction of ionizing photons escaping out of galaxies and reaching the Intergalactic Medium.

I’ve seen some posts recently, about the value of basic research, in light of funding cuts and demands that research have immediate economic justification. Let me collect some info here, in a thread, about why it’s a bad idea to attach those sorts of demands to funding. 🧵 🧪 ⚛️

Prompted by this and a need for distraction I Did Some Math. Turns out most extrasolar planets are quite cauliflower-compatible. A thread, with citations. And laboratory astrophysics. And footnotes.

With the final conference season of the year upon us in the next two weeks, I believe this is apt:

The coffee has to hit right after all!

Summary of the postdoc application process discussion today amongst final year PhDs (over cups of coffee):

Perhaps it's time to start sharing on Bluesky the memes I've been making to document my time as a PhD so far.

Going from the first meme to the second took a while. Still, it's amazing how many things I had barely any clue about are now things I am helping make sense of. 😁

Reminded about this meme I made earlier, after some discussions on different hydrodynamical simulations. (it's time for astro/academia memes on Bluesky!)

Oh hey, look—Elon is destroying the entire field of Astronomy.

Sometimes fitting a model to data "works" based on chi-square and Cash statistics minimisation, but it can still be improved. Thus we look at trends of residuals to access information that such global measures miss, in ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024RNAA...! 🔭🧪

Since it's already fall(!), wanted to share the site where I've been compiling open source astro teaching materials -- e.g., textbooks, lecture notes, visualizations: astroteaching.github.io Pretty piecemeal to now, but would love to link to any other resources not already included here :) 🧪 🔭