PhD candidate in Astronomy at Universidad de Chile, working at the intersection of multimessenger astronomy and alert broker infrastructure.
My research focuses on searching for electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave events using real-time public alert streams from ZTF, LSST, and DECam — in an era where tens of thousands of transients arrive every night.
I build open-source tools to help the astronomy community navigate this flood of time-domain alerts.
- GW counterpart searches — Crossmatching LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA skymaps with ZTF/ALeRCE alert streams to identify kilonova and AGN candidates
- Kilonova simulations — Monte Carlo rate estimation and detection efficiency studies for several Kilonova models
- Alert broker infrastructure — Building pipelines on top of ALeRCE, GCN Kafka streams, and GraceDB for real-time transient classification
- Survey sensitivity — ZTF-based kilonova rate upper limits benchmarked against LVK BNS merger rates
Languages: Python · TypeScript · SQL
Astronomy: astropy · ligo.skymap · healpy · sncosmo · Redback
Brokers & Streams: ALeRCE · GCN Kafka · GraceDB
Backend: PostgreSQL
Frontend: React · Vite · Recharts
DevOps: GitHub Actions · Vercel
Dashboard for GW follow-up — crossmatches LIGO/Virgo events with AGN candidates from ZTF/ALeRCE. Includes GW skymap overlays, ZTF light curves, and GraceDB integration.
Contributed to NASA GCN codebase: PR #3579
Python pipeline for real-time GW skymap × ZTF alert crossmatching. Downloads skymaps from GraceDB, queries ALeRCE, crossmatches against the Milliquas AGN catalog, and ranks candidates by overlap probability.
Published open-source Python packages for the astronomy community → pypi.org/user/hemanth195