I'm a reformed academic, now more interested in the transfer of technology - both my own and other peoples - between research disciplines and out to industry. Since leaving astronomy, I've been the technical lead and now CEO of Blackford Analysis, a spin out group based around medical applications of the MOPED algorithm, in particular ultra-fast 3D registration. I was previously employed as a Business Development Manager at EPCC, part of the University of Edinburgh.

Blackford Analysis

Since 2006 I have worked on applying the MOPED algorithm to fields other than astronomy, in particular medical imaging. I have been the lead researcher on a Scottish Enterprise Proof of Concept award, and the project has also attracted funding from the STFC Follow on Fund. We have formed a spin-out company, Blackford Analysis, of which I am the CEO. Our initial products are based on an ultra-fast 3D registraion technology

Business Development at EPCC

Founded at The University of Edinburgh in 1990, EPCC is a leading European centre of expertise in advanced research, technology transfer and the provision of supercomputer services to academia and business. I worked at EPCC from 2008 to 2010 as a Business Development Manager building projects with industrial partners, enhancing the centre's profile both nationally and internationally, writing large scale European proposals and supporting cycle sales on HECToR, the UK's supercomputing resource.

Astronomy

I spent a total of 8 years as a professional astronomer working at the Institute for Astronomy, part of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. My research involved looking at the light from galaxies at various wavelengths and using their spectra to understand the stellar populations which produced them. The ultimate aim of this work was compose the Star Formation History (SFH) of many galaxies, and use the ensemble results to determine the cosmic star formation history of the Universe. Much of my work concerned the interpretation of galaxy spectra, for which I used an algorithm called MOPED , originally invented by Alan Heavens, and a data resource called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. To deal with the huge volume of results this sort of work produces I used a database language called SQL.

In the unlikely event that you'd like to read it, my thesis can be found at the Edinburgh Research Archive. On that site you should also be able to find the thesis of Rita Tojeiro, a student who I co-supervised with Alan Heavens. Rita developed the VESPA algorithm, which allows even faster analysis of galaxy spectra than MOPED, but is not so readily applicable to more general problems. I also helped supervise Paula Jofre Pfeil, a student at MPA, and helped her develop MAX, a method based on MOPED which allows rapid recovery of stellar atmosphere parameters from stellar spectra.

Publications

My astronomy publications are archived on astro-ph and the NASA ADS. I'm a co-author on one medical imaging proceeding, and the lead inventor on a second MOPED related patent currently at national filing phase, owned by the University of Edinburgh and licenced exclusively to Blackford Analysis

1. DR3 MF data: ASCII, IDL .sav
2. DR3 SFR data: ASCII format cosmic SFR
3. DR1 Mass Function data: ASCII, IDL .sav
4. MOPED DR1 SFR data: ASCII format overall cosmic SFR and a csv format file listing the SFR as a function of mass

Datamining of Massive Datasets

The spectral processing algorithms I developed created huge databases of galaxy properties, which I needed to combine with other large datasets to generate meaningful results. I benefited from the work of the Millennium database project, and developed an interface which can interrogate a GAVO based web SQL-frontend and reformat the response into an IDL structure, now maintained by the Millennium team. The code can be found here and some work performed using the code is detailed in this conference proceeding.