PhD at the Ludwig Maximilian University working on brown dwarf atmospheric retrievals and machine learning
I grew up in Switzerland, did my Bachelor's and Master's degree in Physics with special qualification in Astronomy at the University in Bern. In March 2022 I started my PhD at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) of the University of Bern in the Exoplanet & Brown Darf Science group, and since October 2022, I'm now continuing my PhD at the Ludwig Maximilian University (University Observatory) Munich in the Theoretical Astrophysics of Extrasolar Planets group, lead by Prof. Dr. Kevin Heng.
I am a second-year PhD at the Ludwig Maximilian University (University Observatory) Munich in the Theoretical Astrophysics of Extrasolar Planets group. I’m currently working on the application of atmospheric retrieval methods involving machine learning techniques to the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and directly imaged exoplanets. In doing so, I’m explicitly interested in combining Brown Dwarf theory with astrostatistics methods like Bayesian statistics.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6960-0256
We performed a large suite of atmospheric retrievals on a curated sample of 19 brown dwarfs spanning the entire L-T spectral types to look for trends in their properties and investigate issues with the current techniques used to examine emission spectra.
Using the supervised machine learning method of the random forest, we studied the information content of 14 previously published model grids of brown dwarfs (from 1997 to 2021) and explored the parameter space of generated posteriors for our curated dataset including benchmark brown dwarfs (Gl 570D, epsilon Indi Ba and Bb) as well as a sample of 19 L and T dwarfs; this sample was previously analyzed in Lueber et al. (2022) using traditional Bayesian methods (nested sampling).
Ludwig Maximilian University, University Observatory
Theoretical Astrophysics of Extrasolar Planets group
Scheinerstrasse 1
Munich D-81679
Germany