Contact Information
Urbana, IL 61801
Office Hours
Research Areas
Biography
I joined the faculty at UIUC as an Assistant Professor in 2019.
I did my undergraduate work studying comets that masquerade as asteroids with Prof. Linda French at Illinois Wesleyan, graduating in 2005. My graduate work was on refining the measurement of how fast the Universe is expanding using type Ia supernovae, and I worked with Profs. Christopher Stubbs and Robert Kirshner at Harvard, earning my Ph.D. in 2013.
I was a postdoctoral scholar at NSF's National Optical & Infrared Astronomy Laboratory (NOIRLAB, then NOAO) with Drs. Tom Matheson and Abi Saha, spending many nights atop beautiful Kitt Peak in the Sonoran desert, working on the ANTARES alert broker and flux-calibrating a network of DA white dwarfs for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) currently being comissioned in Chile. I deepened my involvement with LSST as the Barry M. Lasker Data Science Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD.
I've been working with students throughout my time as a postdoc, and deeply value the mentor-mentee relationship. I think we are privilged to study the cosmos, and am deeply committed to public outreach. When I'm not working, you can find me hiking, or behind a camera lens, invariably accompanied by astro-dogs Kepler and Archimedes.
If you'd like to get in touch, shoot me an email, or swing by my office - always happy to get a cup of coffee.
Research Interests
Cosmology
Time-domain Astrophysics
Survey Science
Multi-messenger Astrophysics
Statistics
Data Science
Machine learning
Supernovae
Research Description
My research interests lie at the intersection of multi-messenger and time-domain astrophysics, cosmology, statistics and data science. I work on wide-field surveys developing machine learning (particularly neural network-based) methods for real-time detection and classification of variable and transient sources, Bayesian models for cosmological inference with type Ia supernovae, and establishing an all-sky network of faint spectrophotometric standards for LSST, NGRST and future projects.
I am Analysis Coordinator for LSST's Dark Energy Science Collaboration (formerly deputy Analysis Coordinator and convener of the Time Domain Working Group), co-PI of the Young Supernova Experiment. I am also a PI of the SCiMMA Team (https://scimma.org). I've been a member of the Pan-STARRS, ESSENCE, Foundation, MzLS, SIRAH, and RAISIN surveys, among others.
Education
Physics, Ph.D., Harvard University
Physics, B.S. (Hons), Illinois Wesleyan University
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Astronomy
Associate Professor, Physics
Associate Professor, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
External Links
Recent Publications
Aleo, P. D., Engel, A. W., Narayan, G., Angus, C. R., Malanchev, K., Auchettl, K., Baldassare, V. F., Berres, A., de Boer, T. J. L., Boyd, B. M., Chambers, K. C., Davis, K. W., Esquivel, N., Farias, D., Foley, R. J., Gagliano, A., Gall, C., Gao, H., Gomez, S., ... Wainscoat, R. J. (2024). Anomaly Detection and Approximate Similarity Searches of Transients in Real-time Data Streams. Astrophysical Journal, 974(2), Article 172. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad6869
Pan, Y. C., Jheng, Y. S., Jones, D. O., Lee, I. Y., Foley, R. J., Chornock, R., Scolnic, D. M., Berger, E., Challis, P. M., Drout, M., Huber, M. E., Kirshner, R. P., Kotak, R., Lunnan, R., Narayan, G., Rest, A., Rodney, S., & Smartt, S. (2024). Measuring the ejecta velocities of type Ia supernovae from the pan-STARRS1 medium deep survey. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 532(2), 1887-1900. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1618
Shah, V. G., Narayan, G., Perkins, H. M. L., Foley, R. J., Chatterjee, D., Cousins, B., & Macias, P. (2024). Predictions for electromagnetic counterparts to Neutron Star mergers discovered during LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing runs 4 and 5. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 528(2), 1109-1124. Article stad3711. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad3711
Xie, Y., Chatterjee, D., Narayan, G., & Yunes, N. (2024). Neural post-Einsteinian framework for efficient theory-agnostic tests of general relativity with gravitational waves. Physical Review D, 110(2), Article 024036. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.110.024036
The Dark Energy Science Collaboration (2024). Testing the LSST Difference Image Analysis Pipeline Using Synthetic Source Injection Analysis. Astrophysical Journal, 967(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad3635