Benjamin Thomas

About Benjamin

I am a gender-nonconforming postdoctoral fellow in J. Craig Wheeler’s research group in the Department of Astronomy, UT Austin. I recently graduated with a PhD from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, UK. My interests include supernova (SN) observations, especially collecting detailed spectra of superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) using the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope to understand the statistical diversity of the SLSN population, which may constrain theories of the poorly-understood explosion mechanism.

I also have experience in machine learning with astronomical data-sets. I applied the unsupervised learning algorithm called t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding (t-SNE) to detect anomalies in the novel data-set provided by the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy eXperiment (HETDEX) to discover and/or classify populations of galactic white-dwarf stars, starburst galaxies, and high redshift quasars.

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Education

Postdoc

Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin, 10/2019 - 09/2022

Ph.D.

Observational astronomy, University of Portsmouth, 06/2019

Master's

Astrophysics, University of Sussex, 06/2015

Bachelor's

Physics, University of Sussex, 06/2015