John Vickers Email & Phone Number

Greater Boston

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Shanghai, China

Created the largest catalog of BHB stars to date (4x larger than next competitor) using XGBoost on 150k items using 6k features, with precision and recall rivaling identification by hand.Modeled the evolution of the Galactic metallicity gradient. Updated my age catalog to be one of the 3 largest with new data ingested through my established age pipeline.

Shanghai City, China

Constructed a pipeline to calculate stellar ages using data collated from multiple sources. Assigned ages for 100k stars via Bayesian comparison to a grid of 6.5k model families with 300 models each.Identified rare outliers (<0.01% sample) by model fitting the background population using maximum likelihood and then assigning Bayesian probabilities to data.

Enabled BHB star identification on instruments thought unsuitable to the task by creating a new heuristic selection criteria with KNN and generalizing it to low quality data.Discovered and removed ∼90% of a systemic bias in a major stellar motion catalog. Modeled the bias using shells of spherical harmonics, and selected an appropriate corrective model.

Troy, New York

Researched Palomar 5 (subject of undergrad thesis) and the Sagittarius stream. Wrote scientific articles for public consumption about our Astronomy group's latest findingsMachined extreme pressure experiments and coded diffusion simulations for a Geophysics research group.

Doctor Rerum Naturalium (Ph.D.), Astronomy, Magna Cum Laude

Bachelor Of Science (B.Sc.), Physics, Magna Cum Laude