About Me

I’m Shashank! I’m a first year PhD student in astrophysics at University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. I also enjoy photography and play badminton.

Wrong guy? You might be looking for him

My life and education

2022

University of Queensland

Education

I moved to Brisbane to start a PhD at University of Queensland

2021

Berkeley

Education

I graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in astrophysics and a minor in K-12 STEM education. In addition to my studies at Berkeley, I also:

  • created and ran a 2-unit DeCal course called Beginner’s Guide to the Universe for 4 semesters.
  • played competitively for the Cal Badminton team, organized intercollegiate tournaments and served as their photographer for 3 semesters.
2017

Wilcox High School

Education

I graduated from Adrian Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California. At Wilcox, I

  • started playing badminton and joined Wilcox’s badminton team, where I played doubles with my brother
  • created and ran the Science Club for 3 years
  • did science fair projects on astronomy and competed at the state and international level
2015

NASA

Internship

I interned at NASA AMES Research Center at the K2 Guest Observer’s office after my (and my brother’s) 10th grade science fair topic resulted in the discovery of a candidate exoplanet. While there, I worked on

  • validating, following up and assessing cluster membership of a substellar object orbiting an A-star
  • searching for exoplanets orbiting stars in open clusters using data from K2

Blog

Here’s where I post what I’ve been up to lately. These are sometimes but not always research updates. Other things I post about include things I’ve been working on for fun, personal project interests, musings and other things I think might be helpful to share.

Contents:
Apr 9th, 2023 | What is interferometry?
Jan 8th, 2022 | A 3d-printed moon nightlight
Dec 28th, 2021 | A foldable model of JWST
Dec 27th, 2021 | Hello world

What is interferometry?

For a long time I’ve been meaning to use this blog as a way of explaining my ongoing research interests to my friends who may or may not be astronomers. As I’m coming up on my first-year PhD confirmation, I’m reflecting on everything I’ve learned in the past year. As a way of procrastinating writing my confirmation report, I thought I’d sit down and write up an explanation of the technique I have been learning for much of my PhD so far: interferometry. Perhaps the visuals I’ve made may come in handy for my confirmation too.

A 3d-printed moon nightlight

I’ve been continuing to put my 3d printer through its paces recently, and found out about an intruiging use for 3d printers: printing lithophanes. Lithophanes are objects made from translucent material where the thickness is modulated to produce an image when backlit. One of the most interesting such prints I found was a spherical moon lithophane–which begged me to design and make a nightlamp surrounding it.

A foldable model of JWST

I’ve been very excited for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for a long time. So long, in fact, that I’ve had a JWST poster up in my bedroom since about 2012 or 2013, when I was 12 years old.

Hello world

Hello everyone! This is the intro post for my blog, which I intend to use for semi regular research updates, musings, and side projects which I always seem to be working on. For my main research projects, check out the research porfolio on my home page.

Contact

You can email me at:

Or, you can find me on Twitter at AstroShashank

Research

My research broadly focuses on exoplanets and their host stars. I like to use techniques such as photometry, spectroscopy and polarimetry in new ways to characterize exoplanet systems in detail. Currently I am interested in hot stars with exoplanets, which exhibit a variety of effects such as gravity darkening, oblateness and pulsations, which can all be used to learn more about exoplanets around these stars.