Research projects

Atmospheric turbulence is the cause of degradation of resolution of telescopes in astronomy. Instruments have therefore been developed and equipped around observatories to monitor this turbulence. In this project, we will develop an instrument capable of measuring this turbulence during daytime through observations of stars in the infrared. This will result in the first turbulence profiler applicable during the day and useful to daytime astronomical observations, optical communications and satellite tracking.

CSIRO has a cold spray research group which is developing cold sprayed Invar. This project will be developing an optical metrology setup to measure the creep of the cold sprayed Invar in collaboration with CSIRO Lab22 in Clayton, Victoria.

This project aims to address the potential of Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) as highly nonlinear optical elements, including their potential use in pyramid wavefront sensing.

Accreted stellar populations are comprised of the remnants of destroyed galaxies, and often dominate the 'stellar haloes' of galaxies such as the Milky Way.

The successful applicant will join the ANU team and will assist with the development of instrumentation for the optical communication team

This project aims to demonstrate the advantages of LGS-AO for deep space optical communications.

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is being designed and built by an international consortium of institutions and will be the largest optical telescope in the world when it is completed around 2020.

This project requires significant data analysis efforts and some observational and theoretical efforts.

In collaboration with Omexom and the ACT Government, we are working on reducing light pollution in Canberra. This work involves aspects of using machine learning for monitoring, modelling population flows for automation, and looking at impacts on the environment as well cultural impacts.

This project aims use machine learning to identify and characterise these magnetic red giants in both the Kepler and TESS samples, cross match them with spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE, and map their distribution, chemistry and motion across the Galaxy.

With this project we will be using the newly automated ANU 2.3m telescope and the powerful WiFeS optical spectrograph to perform a time-series measurement of luminous active galaxies (AGN) using the technique of Quasar Reverberation Mapping.

In this project you will develop models to study the properties of globular cluster (GC) populations around galaxies from simulations and observations.

Modelling the oscillations of Red Clump stars using stellar evolution codes to study their internal structure.

You will model stellar spectra with spots to improve the spectrum analysis for some of the active stars observed by the million-star spectroscopic GALAH Survey.

This has wide potential applications to chemical and dynamical studies of galaxies from two-dimensional  integral field unit (IFU) spectroscopy.