Postdoctoral Scholarship in Time Domain Astronomy

The Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech will offer one or more postdoctoral scholarships in time domain astronomy. Active research projects include:

• Transient and stellar astronomy studies with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF; Caltech is the  PI institution) and Sloan Digital Sky Survey-V (Caltech is a member of SDSS-V)

• Infrared transient searches with the ongoing PGIR and WINTER surveys at Palomar Observatory; the upcoming Cryoscope pathfinder in Antarctica; the upcoming Roman Space Telescope (the RAPID PIT and RISE WFS teams are led by Caltech)

• Stellar astrometry and spectroscopy with Gaia and Euclid

• Machine learning and astroinformatics, including work connected with jointly querying ZTF and Rubin data streams and developing software infrastructure enabling multi-messenger discovery

• Systematic studies of AGN variability focusing on extreme transient phenomena in accretion disks and supermassive black hole binaries

• Data mining of extensive light curve archives, including the ZTF Variability Archive (ZVAR), for populations studies of variable phenomena with two decades of data

Associated faculty are Professors Mansi Kasliwal, Matthew Graham, Kareem El-Badry, and Shri Kulkarni. Technical and observational investigations are underway in several areas of optical and infrared time domain astronomy including supernovae, fast radio bursts, gravitational wave counterparts, magnetars, quasars/AGN, exoplanets and compact Galactic binary systems. Postdoctoral scholars will also have the opportunity to interact frequently with Caltech, KITP, and Berkeley faculty through the ZTF Theory Network. Postdocs interested in theory should apply for the Burke Fellowship. Where relevant, this position may be combined with opportunities at other institutional members of the ZTF partnership and SDSS-V partnership.