The Berkeley Transient Classification Pipeline project is a multi-departmental effort, combining people from the Astronomy, Computer Science, and Statistics departments as well as collaborators from Lawrence Berkeley Labs. In addition to working on the classification pipeline, some of the collaborators are already using the ancillary tools and data products in other research projects.
- Joshua Bloom, Principle Investigator
- Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley AstronomyRecently a Sloan Research Fellow, he is considered an expert on gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows; he has played a leading role in seminal efforts to uncover the nature of the progenitors of long and short GRBs as well as X-ray flashes. Science magazine listed the emerging GRB/supernova connection and the short burst discoveries in the Top 10 Breakthroughs of 1999 and 2005, respectively. Aside from DotAstro, Bloom is Principal Investigator of the world’s largest telescope project devoted to infrared transient observations (PAIRITEL, on Mt Hopkins, AZ), commissioned in 2006. The subject of a documentary shown at the American Museum of Natural History, PAIRITEL was used by Bloom and collaborators to find the first contemporaneous infrared afterglow of a GRB, place the first limits on Earth-mass planets around brown dwarfs, and demonstrate the utility of IR observations of Type Ia supernovae for cosmology. Bloom is a well-rated professor in lower-division undergraduate courses and an active lecturer in public forums in the Bay Area. He is Key Project leader in the Palomar Transients Factory, Co-I of an NSF and NASA-sponsored Virtual Observatory project on transients, leader of the GRB Science Working Group for the EXIST mission, and PI of the new Synoptic All-Sky Infrared Imaging Survey concept study (SASIR). His current research group comprises 3 postdocs, 3 graduate students, and 4 undergraduates.
Home page: http://astro.berkeley.edu/~jbloom
- Dan Starr
Dan Starr has been developing software in astronomy for the past 7 years. Projects have ranged from a real-time reduction pipeline for coordinated, binocular all-sky telescopes at LANL, to engineering for Harvard CfA the state machine control system and observation software for the roboticised and rapid responding PAIRITEL telescope. Recent work at Berkeley includes developing a multi-node parallelized reduction pipeline for PAIRITEL's near-IR datastream.
Currently Dan is the primary developer for the Transients Classification Pipeline. This includes generating classification software, feature extractors, source identification algorithms, incorporating various surveys and datastreams, and emitting classified results to other groups.
- John M. Brewer
- Grad Student, SFSU Physics and Astronomy
John began working on the TCP project in early 2008 and is responsible for the design of the TCP Tutor database and data aquisition tools as well as the dotastro.org website. Current projects include code to extract proper motions and parallaxes from a database of SDSS Stripe 82 data, and a new XML format, SimpleTimeseries, to standardize time-series data exchange.
- Justin Higgins
Justin is a third year undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying Physics and Astronomy. With TCP, he has explored the effectiveness of classification schemes on sparsely sampled data. He enjoys teaching student organized courses and repairing computers for UC Berkeley's residents halls.
- Rachel Kennedy
Rachel is an undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying physics and astronomy, currently spending a year abroad at the University of St Andrews. She used the TCP Tutor tools to import lightcurves for dotastro.org and worked to build a taxonomy of astrophysical objects.
- Christopher Klein
- Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Astronomy
Christopher Klein is a graduate student at Berkeley. He grew up in Portland, OR and received his BS in Astrophysics from Caltech. In his free time he likes to bake brownies and experiment to improve his recipe.
Home page: http://astro.berkeley.edu/~cklein
- Dovi Poznanski
- Postdoc, UC Berkeley Astronomy
Dovi's main scientific interests are supernovae (SNe), gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and other transient phenomena. He is also keen on on modern data analysis tools and methods, suitable for current and future large scale surveys. He graduated from the Tel-Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. D. Maoz. Dovi now works in Berkeley on the teams of Professors J. Bloom and A. Filippenko and with P. Nugent at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Home page: http://astro.berkeley.edu/~dovi
- Nat Butler
- Postdoc, UC Berkeley Astronomy
Nat Butler is a GLAST/Einstein Fellow studying astrophysical transients. He is particularly interested in observations of the optical, IR, and X-ray emission from Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs) and their afterglows to study the physics of GRB jets, afterglow emission mechanisms, the nature of GRB progenitors, and in potentially using GRBs as cosmology probes. He is an observer and an experimentalist focusing on robotic telescopes and novel technologies for transient followup.