Josh Shields
Josh is a senior graduate student in astrophysics who has primarily worked on the Type Ia supernova progenitor problem. He does systematic searches of supernova remnants both inside and outside our Galaxy to identify stars that were in a binary system with the white dwarf that exploded to create the remnant. He works with large scale stellar surveys like Gaia, some of the largest ground based telescopes like the VLT, and with space based data like the HST. He uses bayesian inference techniques to learn about stellar populations and search for peculiar stars that are unexplainable by normal processes of stellar evolution. He has also recently begun working on the STARDIS code, a radiative transfer code designed to simulate light running through stellar atmospheres.