The Team Members

Ryan Ridden

I'm a Rutherford Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand. I've worked on image and data processing techniques to find interesting things hidden in astronomical images. This project is a culmination of a few years coding. I'm excited to see what we discover!

Hugh Roxburgh

I'm a new PhD student at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy in Perth Australia. During my undergraduate and honours years at UC, I worked alongside Ryan to find cool explosive things in TESS data. Many of the tools we generated over that time have helped us build this exciting project. Now I work on Fast Radio Bursts - even more rapid extragalactic explosions!

Andrew Moore

I’m a Masters student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. During my undergraduate and honours years, I focused on characterising open clusters but now I work alongside Ryan. I focus on utilising machine learning techniques to detect new objects in TESS data – many of which are in this project!

Clarinda Montilla

I'm a student at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. During my honours year, I worked alongside Ryan to estimate the efficiency of TESS detecting optical transients, such as kilonovae, FELTs and FBOTs. Through this project, we can find out if these estimations are correct and help to further constrain properties of these transients!

Zachary Lane

I'm a second year PhD candidate at the University of Canterbury at Christchurch, New Zealand. I have worked on Type Ia supernova cosmology and analysis alongside other transient data processing and discovery. I am hoping one day that we will have a similar pipeline with other high cadence space telescope data!

James Freeburn

I'm a PhD student at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. I look for the signatures of some of most mysterious and energetic events in the universe — gamma-ray bursts. Through the power of TESS, I am excited to help discover more of these signatures and unravel the mysteries surrounding gamma-ray bursts.

Armin Rest

I'm an Associate Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. My research focuses on all kinds of explosive transients, for example supernovae, kilonova, and tidal disruption events. On my functional side, I work on the calibration of the NIRCam instrument onboard the James Webb Space Telescope.