I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Astronomical Institute "Anton Pannekoek" of the University of Amsterdam. Previously, I was a member of Hertford College, Oxford, where I obtained my undergraduate (MPhys) and graduate (DPhil Astrophysics) degrees.

LOFAR Transients

LOFAR, the LOw Frequency ARray, is a next-generation radio telescope currently under construction in the Netherlands and across Europe. I am associated with LOFAR's Transients Key Science Project, where my chief role is to oversee the development of our real-time astronomical transient detection, monitoring and classification pipeline.

Global Jet Watch

SS433, an eclipsing X-ray binary system, is one of the most exotic objects in our galaxy. The Global Jet Watch project aims to provide round-the-clock monitoring of this object by deploying a network of (relatively) small optical telescopes equipped with custom-built spectrographs to schools around the world. In this way, we hope to combine an exciting scientific education and outreach project with worthwhile astronomical results.

Doctoral Work

I completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Drs Joanne Baker and Isobel Hook between 2002 and 2006. My research used the Taurus Tunable Filter, an innovative instrument on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, to probe the star-forming environments of high-redshift quasars.

My thesis is available for download as a PDF; it weighs in at just over 9 MB.

Just for Fun

Having joined Twitter recently (purely because I was jealous of the box on Casey's website), I was inspired to write a little code. I hacked together a simple Twisted application that displays the latest updates from people you're following on your desktop. It's been tested on both Mac OS (using Growl; screenshot) and Linux (using notification-daemon; screenshot).

It's available for download here; Mac users may also find this .plist handy for using with launchd (customise it, and stick it in ~/Library/LaunchAgents). The code depends on the particularly excellent Twitty Twister by Dustin Sallings; you'll need that and Twisted installed on your system to get started. You should edit the file to configure (at least) your Twitter username and password.

There's a huge bunch of similar projects out there, but as far as I know none that work with both notification-daemon and Growl. Of course, there are also fully-fledged Twitter clients which may provide similar functionality (along with a lot more), but they seem excessive for my needs.