Supervisor: Prof. dr. Scott Trager (Kapteyn)

Prof. Dr. Trager’s research interests are centred around understanding the formation and evolution of the most- massive galaxies in the Universe, primarily through their stellar content: the ages, chemical compositions, and number of stars in these galaxies. His work requires spectroscopic observations of galaxies both in the local and distant Universe, and he builds spectroscopic instruments for large telescopes to facilitate this work. He is currently building a new spectrographic survey facility for the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, where the research team will acquire roughly 30 million spectra of more than 10 million objects (stars and galaxies) over a five-year period beginning in late 2018. By late 2023 the team will have a repository of more than 1.5 x 10^15 pixels, with roughly 1 billion associated parameters.

He is therefore particularly interested in the use of machine learning and computer vision techniques applied to large databases of catalogues and (one-, two-, and three-dimensional) images to extract (often complex) physical information from astronomical data. He has worked for many years with the Intelligent Systems and Scientific Visualization groups in JBI on topics ranging from subspace selection in high-dimensionality catalogues to feature recognition in astronomical images.

Corporate webpage: http://www.rug.nl/staff/s.c.trager/