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Joachim Janz

Astrophysicist, Data Analyst, Developer

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  About Me  




I am a scientist by education. My career in astronomy trained me to solve problems rigorously and with an analytic approach.

Most commonly I use python and C++ as my tools. For observational data I regularly develop data processing pipelines, most recently for the Euclid mission of the European space agency. The adaptation of additional languages and tools in my work are a testament to my quick learning abilities.

I gained ample experience with procuring data and interpreting them using statistical and other methods. For the data collection I became skilful in communicating goals to observing time committees of the largest telescopes, as well as in finding and processing available data.

I contributed to the work of international teams, supervised students, and taught university courses. Examples of my work (as well as personal interests) can be found below.

Recent selected projects

Google Maps-like interface for galaxy cluster data

In our EU Horizons 2020 international training network SUNDIAL we collected unprecedented images of the Fornax galaxy cluster. To help our collaboration to explore the data set and maximise its use, I am running a web-server with a Google Maps-like interface. The map interface can be also accessed by the general public view the link below.

View Fornax cluster map

Virtual Classroom

During the COVID-19 pandemia, we had to organise our Astronomy teaching remotely. While the 'Zoom' Classroom worked out for teacher-centred instructions, I did not see it suitable for my programming course. For more interactivity I ran a jupyter hub (in a docker container) and virtual dockerised access points for the students. Custom jupyter line and cell magics allowed to submit and review pieces of code. This way we could code interactively together in addition to the video link.

Details available on request

Image credit: Alissa Eckert, MSMI; Dan Higgins, MAMS

Hard- and software for photomacrography

To image tiny things I built a custom setup for a DSLR. The optics are largely based on a microscope objective on bellows, which offers sufficient resolution. LED rings are used for lighting allowing for dark and bright field illumination as well as special phase contrast and Rheinberg setups. The razor thin depth-of-field is conquered by focus stacking and the camera being mounted on an industrial linear actuator with a stepper motor. A custom PCB with an ESP32 orchestrates the positioning and exposing of the camera. This all can be controlled via a web-interface via a WIFI access point.

Contact me if you are interested in the ESP32 firmware or the PCB

Experience

Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO (FINCA) / University of Turku

FINCA Postdoctoral Fellow

I collaborated with ESA's Euclid mission by developing two image processing pipelines (running within the Euclid infrastructure, development with git source control and CI/CD). I contributed to the University's education with two regular and several block courses, and supervised students (from Bachelor to PhD level). In collaboration with a PhD student in Groningen, the Netherlands, we applied machine learning techniques to identify a certain type of galaxies in imaging data.

Swinburne University of Technology

Senior Postdoctoral Fellow

I started new collaborations and developed my standing as an independent scientist. I was awarded observing time with the 10m Keck telescope and dived into spectroscopy. I also supervised a summer student and led the group meetings in absence of Prof. Forbes.

University of Oulu

Postdoctoral Research Assistant

I learned about and applied N-body simulations (implementing additional fixed potentials to GADGET, a C simulation code). I helped developing visualisation tools (in IDL) for the fitting of two-dimensional multi-component models to the light distribution of galaxies.

Universities of Heidelberg and Oulu

PhD student

    I led the near-infrared imaging part of the SMAKCED project (15 international team members) - The coordination of the observing campaign at observatories in La Palmas and Chile was significantly helped by my custom mySQL database and corresponding web-interface. I obtained several grants including 2 years of funding by the Daimler-Benz foundation

SAP

Summer job

I incorporated a data set of several 1000s of entries into an internal database.

Education & Degrees

University of Oulu, Finland

July 2020

Title of Docent

In recognition of my scientific achievements (in total leading to 43 publications with >1100 citations) after the PhD degree and, in particular, my qualifications in teaching.

At the University of Oulu I taught the regular courses Galaxies and Research Project I (here in particular the usage of computers and programming in python as a tool for scientists), as well as block courses on python and mySQL. I co-supervise two PhD students, and I supervised a Bachelor student as well as two summer students.

Universities of Oulu, Finland, and Heidelberg, Germany

2009 - 2013

PhD in Astronomy

I led the near-infrared imaging part of the SMAKCED project. I also instructed peers to prepare and carry out the observations. For the data reduction I developed my own code (bash and IRAF based for NIR imaging, and C-based for spectroscopy).

University of Heidelberg, Germany

2004 - 2008

Master of Science in Physics

German Diplom, German equivalent to the Master before the Bologna process.

University of Heidelberg, Germany

2002 - 2004

Bachelor of Science in Mathematics

Bachelor of Science in Physics

Two German Vordiplom, German equivalents to the Bachelor before the Bologna process.

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