We all work as part of the VERITAS Collaboration, a group of over 100 astronomers from USA, Canada, Ireland and Germany that operate VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System), a major ground-based gamma-ray observatory located at the basecamp of the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona, USA. VERITAS comprises an array of four 12m optical reflectors for gamma-ray astronomy in the very high energy (VHE: 50 GeV - 50 TeV) range.

The Team

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Ralph Bird

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where I use VERITAS data, along with other observations, to study objects in our own galaxy. These objects provide clues to how we can accelerate particles to such high energies to produce gamma-rays, and hopefully we can use these objects (and the extreme environments they contain) to test how well we understand the laws of physics. I am particularly interested in how we design experiments and making sure that what we are measuring is what is going on and that we are not measuring how we are doing the measurement (imagine going fishing using a net with a large mesh size, you don't catch any small fish - does that mean that there are no small fish or do you need to use a different method?). Your classifications will enable us improve our understanding of how VERITAS works, and from that improve the science that we can do with VERITAS and better work to understand our universe.

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Michael Daniel

As VERITAS Operations Manager I deal with the day-to-day running of the telescopes at their Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory site. This involves everything from making sure the hardware is running at maximum capability to ensuring we have observers to operate the telescopes. Muons are so much more than a source of background events to our gamma-ray data analyses, they are also a well understood source of light that allows us to calibrate the telescopes and understand how they perform and age in the desert environment they are located in. The camera electronics degrades with time and our telescopes have no dome to shelter them from the weather so our mirrors also lose reflectivity as time passes. Understanding the change in muon light yield we collect from day-to-day, year-to-year enables us to understand our telescopes as much today as when they were built 10 years ago.

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Hugh Dickinson

I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Before joining the Zooniverse family, I spent most of my career using Very High Energy gamma-ray astronomy to help understand the processes that occur in the most extreme regions of our Universe. These regions act like gigantic cosmic accelerators that eject streams of charged particles with enormous energies, at speeds approaching that of light. The viciously twisted spacetime near black hole event horizons and the blast waves thrown out by exploding supernovae are just examples of the mind-boggling phenomena that instruments like VERITAS can probe. Modern scientific instruments can (and do) provide us with abundant data that are both exquisite in their precision and challenging in their analysis. I'm excited by the many ways that human beings and computers can work together to help solve some of the trickiest and most intriguing problems in modern science.

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Qi Feng

I am currently a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University. I study variable emission powered by supermassive black holes using data from VERITAS and other instruments. These dramatic gamma-ray variability helps us probe the structures around supermassive black holes and understand how particles are accelerated to relativistic speed. I also try to employ new statistical tools, especially machine learning algorithms (e.g. convolutional neural networks), into astrophysical research, as these tools are often powerful and easy to use. A large data set with correct labels is essential to the training of a machine learning algorithm. Citizen science like the VERITAS Muon Hunter project here is a potentially great way to obtain such a data set of high quality, and therefore an important basis of a good machine learning model.

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Kevin Flanagan

	Kevin is a Research Masters student at University College Dublin, studying the application of machine learning to astrophysics.

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Lucy Fortson

I am an associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. I have been part of the VERITAS project since the very early days before the telescopes were built. I am also a particle physicist by training (I received my PhD from UCLA working on the UA1 experiment at CERN) but my passion was always in astronomy. Gamma-ray astrophysics is the perfect union allowing me to investigate cosmic accelerators that can generate particles with energies well beyond what we humans can generate with our accelerators on earth. Being electrically neutral, gamma rays can traverse the millions of lightyears between the active galaxies that emit them and our detectors without being deflected by intervening magnetic fields. They thus allow us to probe the engines that produce these incredibly energetic particles. But this particular project, Muon Hunters, makes me very happy. I am also a cofounder of the Zooniverse and for the past many years, I have dreamed of this moment where the wonderful Zooniverse volunteers can help gamma-ray astronomy.

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Amy Furniss

Amy was born in Northern California in the mountains outside of Arcata and attended Kneeland Elementary school, a tiny 36 person K-8th school. Her interest in physics only became apparent after a high school physics class where Weldon Benzinger piqued her interest in the subject through interactive lectures. After high school, she went on to recieve her B.S. in Physics at Humboldt State University. While at HSU she enjoyed the small class sizes and accelerated science courses. She worked with Dr. David Kornreich and the ALFALFA team at Cornell University to survey the 21 cm sky with the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico. During this research project, she traveled to Puerto Rico to see the telescope (the largest in the world) and discovered an uncatalogued galaxy, now referred to as AGC 193784. After a year break following the receipt of her undergraduate degree, she moved to Santa Cruz, CA. At University of California in Santa Cruz she recieved her M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics working with Dr. David A. Williams and the VERITAS Collaboration to understand the very high energy gamma-ray emission from extreme galaxies. Endeavoring to constrain the distances of various extreme gamma-ray blazars, she discovered that the bright gamma-ray blazar PKS 1424+240 was the most distant gamma-ray blazar detected by gamma-ray instruments such as VERITAS. After the completion of her Ph.D., Amy continued her research at Stanford University for two years before she started work at California State University as an Assistant Professor. She currently spends her time teaching physics courses and leading the VERITAS Blazar Working Group, where she coordinates observation campaigns on extreme gamma-ray blazars. The observation campaigns often include gamma-ray observations by the Fermi Large Area Telescope, X-ray observations by the NASA Swift and NuSTAR telescopes, optical observations from various ground-based instruments as well as multi-orbit pointed observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Michael Laraia

I am an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota where I am studying computational physics. I am excited by finding ways to apply machine learning techniques to help us solve interesting problems in physics and astrophysics. For this project I am working on using unsupervised machine learning techniques to cluster images before they are shown to citizen scientists for classification. We believe this process will make the process of gathering classifications on a large dataset more efficient. I am excited to be involved with the second iteration of the Muon Hunters project.

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Reshmi Mukherjee

I am a professor of Physics at Barnard College of Columbia University and I carry out research with the VERITAS Observatory. My research interests are in high-energy gamma-ray astrophysics, in the study of active galactic nuclei, unidentified gamma-ray sources, the extragalactic gamma-ray background, and galactic sources such as pulsar wind nebulae, and supernova remnants. I am always eager to introduce students at all levels to the excitement of high energy astrophysics research. I am currently conducting research towards the development of a next-generation ground based gamma-ray telescope.

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Stephan O'Brien

I am a postdoctoral researcher at McGill university, where I am working on the development of the HELIX experiment and using data taken by the VERITAS instrument. In particular, I use VERITAS observations to study a type of extragalactic source know as blazars. The term blazar refers to a galaxy in which the super massive black hole at the centre produces highly collimated jets of relativistic plasma in the direction of earth. I’m interested in studying the gamma-ray emission from these blazars and using the emission to study the early universe and its evolution, as well as using the emission from these distant sources as “test beams” for particle physics. I’ve always been interested in what we can learn from “raw data”. At the raw level one might simply gloss over and throw out non-ideal data, but in doing so might throw out new and exciting discoveries. This, for me, is why Muon Hunter is such an exciting project to be involved in.

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Amy C. Oliver

Amy C. Oliver is the Public Affairs Officer for the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) in Amado, AZ; an informal-learning STEM educator; a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador; and an OSIRIS-REx Ambassador. She manages and directs public relations, the Visitor & Science Center, public education, school programs, volunteers, and development for FLWO, and coordinates with various observatories and scientists on and off-site, including VERITAS, to engage the public in meaningful connections to difficult concepts, and to inspire wonder in learning about astrophysics, space science, and the science in our daily lives. Oliver holds a Master of Museum Studies from the University of Oklahoma, is currently pursuing a STEM graduate certificate, and will begin studies towards an Educational Doctorate(EdD)in STEM Learning Leadership in 2020.

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Rene Ong

I am a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles in the area of high energy astrophysics astroparticle physics. I have been pursuing topics at the boundary between physics and astronomy for more than two decades through experiments done in space and on the ground. I am excited in trying to understand what the universe is made of and to try to pin down the nature of the mysterious dark matter. I consider myself a true experimentalist and really enjoy building equipment and making it work, along with analyzing data from the experiments that we develop.

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John Quinn

	John is an Associate Professor of Physics at University College Dublin. He is an astrophysicist who uses gamma-ray and radio telescopes to study galaxies, and a strong interest in scientific software development.

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Iftach Sadeh

I am a post-doctoral physics researcher at the DESY German research institute. My background is in particle physics, studying the structure of the proton at the LHC (ever heard of multi-parton interactions?). I'm also active in Cosmology, measuring gravitational redshifts in galaxy clusters. In addition, I work on using machine learning to estimate photometric redshifts in optical experiments, like the Dark Energy Survey. My current focus is high energy gamma ray astrophysics. I'm part of the CTA and VERITAS projects, which are imaging Cherenkov telescope arrays. CTA is close to being realised, while VERITAS has been collecting data since 2007. A big part of the challenge in investigating the data is to classify complicated images of gamma-ray events (more machine learning). The latter helps to understand busy environments, such as the centre of our galaxy, which contains overlapping/extended gamma-ray emitters. This is an area of research where citizen science can really help - we need human insight to help us steer the learning algorithms to the right path.

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Stephen Serjeant

Stephen Serjeant is a professor of astronomy at the Open University in the UK, who describes himself as a "recovering blob counter". He has spent most of the last two decades working in infrared astronomy, in which distant starbursting galaxies appear as blobs in infrared images. He is the president of the Society for Popular Astronomy, and fell in love with astronomy aged about five, when he would not eat baked beans without counting them first. You can follow Stephen on Twitter at @stephenserjeant.

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David Williams

David Williams is a member of the VERITAS and CTA collaborations, pursuing the study of high-energy gamma-rays from astrophysical objects. These experiments adapt experimental techniques developed for particle physics to explore outstanding problems in high-energy astrophysics and gamma-ray astronomy. He is particularly interested in understanding the nature of gamma-ray bursts and the high-energy emission mechanism of active galactic nuclei. He participates in both the development of the instrumentation for the experiments, especially the electronics and photodetectors, and in the analysis and interpretation of the data.

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