Astroseminar Series - Renee Hlozek - HYBRID

Renee Hlozek is an Associate Professor at the Dunlap Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UofT. She was born in Pretoria, South Africa where she completed her undergraduate degree. She completed her DPhil at Oxford University in 2011 as a South African Rhodes Scholar. After four years as the Lyman Spitzer Fellow at Princeton University, she moved to Toronto in 2016. She is a 2019 CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, a Sloan fellow and was elected to the New College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada in 2022. She uses data from telescopes around the world to understand how the universe started, what it is made of, and how it changes with time. 

Title: Flashes of light from the sky to the brain

Abstract:  In the sky: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will generate a data deluge: millions of astronomical transients and variable sources will need to be classified from their light curves. The Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC) was born out of the need to simulate a variety of astronomical transients in a Rubin-like sky. It ran as a community classification challenge in 2018. The second generation of this challenge, the Extended LSST Astronomical Time-series Classification Challenge (ELAsTiCC) was an expert challenge to broker teams themselves to classify alert streams. I'll discuss these challenges and the work within DESC to prepare for Rubin data. 

Looking to the brain: I'll describe work using astronomical image analysis techniques applied to high-resolution images of the brain to search for signs of neurodegeneration and describe the processes that generated this interdisciplinary research.