About Me

I’m Shashank! I’m a third year PhD candidate 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.

Research

My research focuses on developing techniques to map the surfaces and structures of stars and exoplanets. Recently, I have been building analytic, differentiable models for photometric, spectroscopic, and interferometric observations, and working towards a suite of open-source JAX software packages [1, 2, 3, 4] implementing them. I apply these models to high-precision data from instruments such as JWST and CHARA to create detailed surface maps and to investigate how rotation and tides deform stars and planets.