UR Students Present to American Astronomical Society

Three University of Richmond students who have done original research in astrophysics have presented their results at the recent 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The American Astronomical Society January meeting brings together thousands of astronomers, astrophysicists, media, and members of the public. At this year’s meeting in Kissimmee, Florida, in January 2016 two UR students, juniors Joseph George and Evan Jones, presented posters, while senior Haonan Liu presented a talk.

Liu has worked with Professor Ted Bunn for several years on optimizing interferometers to explore the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background. His talk was entitled “Fisher Matrix Optimization of Cosmic Microwave Background Interferometry.”

Jones has worked with Professor Jack Singal for several years on a few different projects. His poster dealt with his expoloration of a support vector machine learning algorithm to predict the redshifts of galaxies and was entitled “Shape Information for Photometric Redshifts with a Support Vector Machine Algorithm.”

George is a Computer Science major who has worked with Professor Singal as well. His poster was on the topic of new statistical routines for the analysis of large survey data sets and was entitled “Population Studies of Quasars in Infrared and X-Ray Light.”