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I wanted to share the brilliant news that Andy passed his PhD viva at the University of Exeter yesterday.
His thesis was “ T-Tauri stars: Identification by explainable machine learning and investigation into the effects of starspots”
Congratulations Dr Wilson!
Jeremy
Many thanks.
The experience of doing photometry and spectroscopy, learning from fellow BAA members has been invaluable. Both helping with my application to do a PhD, and when it came to analysing observational data. The knowledge I gained from being a member of the Variable Star Section has been especially beneficial to my research into young stars. They are highly variable, and some other types of variable star can share observational features with young stars, so a broad knowledge has been very useful.
I am fortunate to have a 3 year postdoc in star formation starting next month. Then I will switch from being a part-time to a full-time researcher.
Best wishes,
AndyIt is a great pleasure to be acquainted (even if only epistolary) with a person who knows a lot about the subject matter of one’s passion. Many congratulations to Dr Andy
Many congratulations Doc. Wilson! It’s a long road and you have reached your destination.
You can now expect to be asked by visiting tradespersons (as I once was) for assistance with treating assorted ailments!!
AlanMany thanks for all of the kind words.
Yes, this means I will become a ‘professional astronomer’, a three year position as a ‘Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Astrophysics’. Early career astronomy researchers typically work at a variety of institutions or countries on two to three year contracts with specific research goals.
My research will involve examining spectra taken by the William Herschel Telescope. The main part of my PhD was identifying candidate young stars, using photometry in the optical and infrared. The WHT will obtain follow up spectra for several thousand of these candidate young stars. These spectra will allow me to confirm or refute their nature as young stars.
Best wishes,
AndyMany congratulations Doc. Wilson!
You can now expect to be asked by visiting tradespersons (as I once was) for assistance with treating assorted ailments!!
AlanAlan, Andy,
Our late friend Dr Dave Gavine – who was awarded Scotland’s first Open University PhD for his thesis ‘Astronomy in Scotland 1745–1900’ – related the story of a visit to the National Gallery of Scotland during which his mobile phone started ringing. As a member of staff walked over to reprimand him, Dave commented “Apologies, I’m a doctor…” 🙂
Have fun with your title.
Alex.
I am glad it is ‘explainable’. That means Andy could explain it to a BAA meeting some time! (I daresay there is some specialised meaning of this term in play though).
Well-done Andrew, not easy doing a PhD on a part-time basis.
David
The ‘explainable’ bit means it is not a black box. With many kinds of machine learning, you don’t know the precise details of how the input data are transformed into the outputs. I used naive Bayes, which is basically maths. So you can trace the output back through the calculations to the inputs. This means the results can be explained and fully understand in terms of the input data. For my research it means I can understand why a particular object was classed as a young star, or as some other kind of object.
Thanks,
Andy
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