I'm Josh! I'm a postdoctoral researcher working with Professor Wolfgang
Kerzendorf
and the Kerzendorf Group who specializes
in radiative transfer and plasma modeling for spectral synthesis, bridging the gap between
physics and code. I do a lot of software
development on codes under the tardis-rt umbrella
that is used by astrophysicists worldwide. All of our code is open-source and publicly available,
with detailed documentation and accompanying tutorials. I deeply believe in the importance of
accessibility, and that belief shapes all of the software I create.
Before I focused on software development, I did extensive work modeling stars and searching
for surviving companions of type Ia supernovae to learn about their progenitor systems and test
different progenitor theories. I've used statistical methods capitalizing on the revolutionary GAIA
mission as well as archival Hubble data to investigate the stellar populations.
I work at the intersection of observation and theory, making detailed models of stellar
atmospheres and explosive transiants to simulate escaping light which we compare to observations to
learn about the structure and composition of the things we see in the sky.
I am the primary developer of the open-source STARDIS
code, which solves the radiative transfer equation in the outer layers of a star to simulate
light passing through it.