Academic Work

For over seven years, I worked in academic astronomy at the University of Leicester. My research work focused on developing statistical techniques to analyse massive datasets of astronomical observations. I was particularly interested in identifying objects known as active galactic nuclei (AGN): black holes that sit at the centres of galaxies and emit huge amounts of radiation.

The full list of my published works, and those I have contributed to, can be found on the ADS and through my Orcid ID: 0000-0001-6256-6710

PhD Work

Throughout my PhD, I studied AGN and the galaxies in which they lived. This was motivated by a known relationship that says the masses of galaxies and the black holes that live at their centres are strongly correlated: bigger galaxies host bigger black holes. This suggests the way in which these objects grow is related. Since the way to tell when a black hole is growing is when it emits radiation (in the AGN phase), my thesis focused on identifying which types of galaxies are more likely to host AGN. With this information, we could narrow down which galactic properties are most influential in growing black holes. Does simply having more mass increase the chances of the black hole growing, for example? Do the winds produced in galaxies that are forming more stars make it more likely that gas moves into the black hole? Or were black holes more likely to have in the Universe's past? These were the types of questions we were hoping to answer.

XMM2Athena

After my completing my PhD, I joined the XMM2Athena collaboration. Their aim was to improve the algorithms and datasets associated with the XMM-Newton X-ray satellite. I had the privilege of working on numerous projects with researchers from across Europe to help further the collaboration's goals. My main focus was to interview my colleagues and produce reports intended for our EU funnders detailing the novel science goals that we'd achieved.

Athena

As part of ongoing preparations for the Athena X-ray satellite, due to be launched in 2037, I performed an investigation into how effectively current source detection algorithms perform on images we expect the telescope to produce. In this investigation, I ran numerous simulations of Athena observations on a well-studied region of the sky called the Chandra Deep Field South and then applied several source detection algorithms on the resulting images. I wrote a report detailing the benefits, drawbacks and improvements of using each algorithm. This report will go on to inform the design of the source detection algorithms used by the Athena satellite.