I am a grant research fellow based at the University of Turku. I recently completed my PhD at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Danny Steeghs and Joe Lyman. I am a survey builder and core team member on the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) project.

My research principally focuses on machine/deep learning techniques for time-domain astrophysics, as well as high-cadence observations of transients, Bayesian methods, and general astronomical software development – with a particular focus on applying state-of-the-art computational techniques from the ML literature to hard problems/datasets in astrophysics.

Recent work have transitioned towards astrophysical transients, with me leading the follow-up of a number of objects.

I am a keen advocate for open-source development, and reproducible workflows in astronomy and astrophysics. I primarily code in Python, and use a combination of TensorFlow and JAX for my ML work.

I am always keen to start new collaborations and projects on topics of interest - please get in touch!

Thomas Killestein

Postdoctoral Researcher University of Turku