I've loved space and astronomy ever since I was a kid, and have been working for my whole life to make a life out of my passion.
I finished a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo in June 2021, and am perusing a Masters in
Computational Science and Data Engineering at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.
I've learned though those years that my skill set lie best in programming, problem solving, and software development, and that I'm always
looking for an excuse to design something new and challenge my software skills.
I opened my first door in astronomy when I was accepted for an 8 month internship at the Gemini Observatories, at both Hilo Hawaii and La Serena,
Chile locations. This was my first real programming job, where I designing a testing framework for
DRAGONS , a data reduction tool which
aims to fully replace the ageing IRAF platform. DRAGONS has the scalability to be adopted by any optical observatory, which meant stability and
expandability to other observatories was crucial to its success. I also tested and polished an existing internal program used as a tool by
scientists during observations to shave time off of observation runs.
After Gemini, I found a position at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, specifically at the Effelsberg 100 meter radio telescope.
Here I was responsible for creating a new program to replace the existing communications interface with the sub
reflector of the observatory. This program utilized TCP/IP and UPD sockets, multithreading, multiprocessing, broadcasting and multicasting, and
contained a proper GUI, testing and documentation for future applications. I created this from ground up over the four months of my internship.
Upon a planned future hardware update, this program is expected to be fitted to replace the current system as the default communications with
the sub reflector.
My next internship was with the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, where I created a simulated version of the CCAT-Prime
Observatory with the aims to help the development and testing of key programs necessary for first light in 2024. The first working version was
completed in only half the time, meaning by the end of the internship a fully tested, documented, and polished version was available to the
software team for their ongoing development. This simulated version of the telescope became an critical tool for the software team, and was
designed to be as indistinguishable as possible from the real system.
I wrote my bachelor's thesis at the same institution, where I used a relational database to create a distributed data migration pipeline to
facilitate the daily transfer of all the science data from the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope to data storage facilities at Max Planck
Institute for Radio Astronomy, Cornell University, and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. The back-end server, user facing
client, and Amazon S3 compatibility was also built as part of the thesis. This data migration pipeline will be responsible for 5-7 terabytes
of science data produced every single day, and utilized MySQL, Docker, Golang, Python, Amazon S3, and Minio object storage to name a few
tools. I continued testing and scaling this pipeline as a full time summer job before starting my Masters.
My most recent internship was as an Openlab intern at CERN; in Geneva, Switzerland. My work here includes analyzing the static and dynamic security
of kubernetes clusters, analyzing pods and their vulnerabilities, and migrating internal docker images from Gitlab registry to Helm for
better security enforcement. The project mainly used Open Policy Agent (OPA, specifically Gatekeeper) and Network Policies. I absolutely loved
this position as it gave me an opportunity to work on state-of-the-art research, and help improve science research at the largest science
experiment in the world. It also provided a great experience into the world of Dev Ops, which I hope to pursue further as a thesis focus.
I'm now writing my masters thesis while at CERN with the SY-STI-BMI group working on expanding the scoring capabilities of MOIRA, the C++
upgrade for FLUKA, a decades old monte carlo simulator for beam and matter interaction. This work will continue until August 2023, at which
point I hope to continue as a PhD in computational physics (wither some sort of accelerator physics or astrophysics).