Jeffrey Cummings, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Remote

Los Angeles

I developed for Dost Education a Hindi-voicemail model to identify valid user-feedback voicemails and speaker demographics from the parent's using their product. This project included several responsibilities:1. I applied audio-decibel analysis to remove silence and background noise from Dost voicemails downloaded from AWS S3.2. I characterized and engineered audio-pitch features from each voicemail with Python programs.3. I applied a stacked MLP neural network, XGBoost, and random forest classifier to identify valid voicemails (Recall: 91%), if the speaker is a mother or father (Acc: 85%), and the highest-quality voicemails, which are then prepped and fed to Google Speech API to transcribe/translate into Hindi/English, cutting manual voicemail work by > 85%.

I was the project lead working on observationally improving our understanding of rotation, convection, and mass loss in stars. This project included several responsibilities: 1. I built predictive models with regression techniques to connect a star's initial characteristics (mass, composition, rotation rate) to their final stages of evolution and resulting death and stellar remnant.2. I performed weighted fits of evolution models to star-cluster observations using my C programs.3. I used Python’s HDBSCAN clustering algorithm to efficiently identify star clusters and a star’s membership probability. This used 5 features acquired using either API or SQL calls to the 550 GB Gaia DR2 database.4. I developed a new method to simultaneously match models to both the spectroscopic and photometric observations of white dwarfs within these star clusters (increasing precision by at least a factor of 2). These were used to determine the white dwarf's current mass and age, while its star cluster's parameters allowed us to connect these to the characteristics of the star that evolved to form it.5. I applied Monte-Carlo simulations to discover novel ways to directly observe the effects of a star’s rotation and convection.6. I spectroscopically analyzed key elemental abundances on the surface of stars (e.g., Lithium, Boron) to independently constrain the star's age and rotational mixing within stars.7. I spectroscopically and photometrically observed large samples of stars to analyze how stellar characteristics changed with differing masses, ages, and compositions. 8. To support this work, I was the primary investigator (PI) for a Hubble Space Telescope Project (Award of $203,502), and I was the Co-PI of a National Science Foundation Grant (Award of $238,171). I further supported this work with 8 successful observing proposals at the Keck, Gemini, and Anglo-Australian Observatories.

Concepción Province, Chile

I led the development of data analysis techniques to classify populations of cluster stars based on their abundance features, in particular for multiple populations in globular clusters. My contributions included several responsibilities: 1. I increased this project’s observational efficiency by a factor of 4 by developing and validating new techniques. 2. I observed and analyzed multiple star-cluster observations.3. I connected photometric and spectroscopic star-cluster features into a classification model using my synthesis techniques. 4. I further supported this work with 2 successful observing proposals at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatories.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Astronomy

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Physics And Astronomy