Olivia C. Email & Phone Number

Dissertation work focused on studying the properties of cosmic voids and void galaxies in state-of-the-art magnetohydrodynamical simulations and ground-based surveys.-Implemented algorithms to detect hundreds of thousands of voids in large, time domain data sets.-Designed and trained a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network to generate density maps of the universe. Used the statistics of cosmic voids in the maps as a metric for gauging network training.-Analyzed the star formation of simulated galaxies, creating and visualizing galaxy density maps by writing parallelized code capable of efficiently assigning millions of particles to a grid.

I have over 8 semesters of experience as a graduate teaching fellow for laboratories and discussion sections for Introduction to Astronomy courses, teaching both majors and non-majors.-I cultivated excellent skills in science communication and public speaking.-For the major courses, I guided observational projects, wrote introduction to Python, data analysis, and data visualization Jupyter notebooks, and converted existing labs into Jupyer notebooks.

I was a Co-instructor for two natural science courses at Boston University’s Core Curriculum program in Fall 2022 (CC 111) and Spring 2023 (CC 212)-I led laboratory and discussion sections, developed lesson plans and project ideas, gave lectures, and directed undergraduate teaching assistants that were assisting in running laboratory sections.

I analyzed error in amateur astronomer reported visual magnitudes for comet C/1995 O1 Hale-Bopp for use in compiling lightcurves and estimating dust production rates. In doing so, I assisted in developing a self-consistent statistical algorithm for combining photometric observations of comets made by amateurs to create significant and accurate lightcurves, and I implemented this algorithm in a publicly available Python routine.

Undergraduate teaching assistant for AST4721L - Astrophysics Laboratory in Spring 2017. Assisted in grading papers and laboratory exercises.

Summer research intern at Northern Arizona University's Department of Astronomy. I developed a pipeline for detecting active asteroids and main-belt comets in over 35,000 images from the Dark Energy Survey, tracking objects over multiple images to characterize their astrometry and search for repeated signs of activity.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Astronomy

Master'S Degree, Astronomy

Bachelor Of Arts - Ba, Mathematics

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Physics