Research at West Virginia University

Since 2016 May, I have been working with Prof. Dr. Loren Anderson as a postdoctoral fellow at the West Virginia University, studying the global Galactic massive star-formation and HII-regions. The main research project will be to use a large catalog of Galactic HII-regions to link Galactic and extragalactic star formation using studies of the Galactic HII-region luminosity function, the Galactic star formation rate, and the star formation rate efficiency.
Research at LAM

I am involved in the ViaLactea project (PI.: Dr. Sergio Molinari) which is an international research group funded by the EU. The main goals of this project are: try to detect and identify bubble-like structures and other, more complex, structures, extract compact sources and filamentary structures from the large scale Galactic Plane surveys via developing a new image processing tool. It also a desired aim to design and develop visual analytic environments to interactively analyze the multi-dimensional Galactic Plane knowledge-base. Furthermore, the project would like to develop a new bottom-up recipe for the star formation rate.

Our sub-group (leaders: Dr. Annie Zavagno and Dr. Delphine Russeil) in Marseille (France) has the main goal of build and visualize a new 3D representation of the Milky Way. For this, heliocentric distance of all structures and sources has to be calculated. To achieve this, we need kinematic inormation of radio spectroscopic data, a 3D extinction map and an updated rotational curve of our Galaxy. My responsibility is to obtain the significant velocity information of various spectral lines from different surveys.
Graduate research at University of Cologne

I have successfully applied for a Ph.D. position to University of Cologne and I became a member of Prof. Dr. Jürgen Stutzki's team. Due to my fields of interest (astro- and molecule-chemistry, (sub)mm astronomy, molecules in the ISM, and PDRs), I have been involved in few scientific projects but I mainly focused on WADI).

The physical and chemical processes in molecular clouds are strongly interconnected; the density and temperature of interstellar material define the possible chemical reactions. The surroundings of young and massive stars are heavily influenced by UV radiation emitted by these stars and that radiation and possibly strong stellar winds govern the local physical, and chemical conditions.

Within WADI (PI: PD. Dr. Volker Ossenkopf), I investigated these interactions via observations of NGC 3603. During my work, I am focused on three basic scientific topics, namely the chemistry, dynamics and energy balance of molecular clouds. Of course, there are many questions which are need to be answered and I have been trying to find reliable responses: what kind of physical processes and conditions can trigger star formation in molecular clouds; how the UV radiation field interacts with molecular clouds (and/or how the strong stellar wind, provided by hot and young massive stars, influences the interstellar gas in their environment). I am also interested about the different chemical reactions: which reactions dominate and could lead to the formation of more complex molecules. Observing light hydrides (CH, NH etc.) and derive column densities can help to improve chemical models. Carbon species (12CO, 13CO, 12C+) could also allow to determine abundance ratios that can point to better understanding of carbon fractionation which is still not clear. Because Herschel has a very good velocity resolution, the investigation of detected emission lines can help to study the velocity structures of an observed molecular cloud. Investigation of the physics of energy balance can be done by, for example, comparison of cooling line intensities ([OI], [CII]).

Because I am also a member of HIFI-ICC, I am occasionally visited SRON institute in The Netherlands and I learnt to use Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE) and make some tests of different observation IDs and packages of HIPE for check any strange or unusual behavior of the softwer.
Research at RIT

From August, 2006 to August, 2008 I used to work at Rochester Institute of Technology as a data analyst in “The Most Massive Stars” project lead by Prof. Dr. Don Figer. I had been working on a IDL code for derive physical parameters of stars of the Quinutplet cluster (generate light curves as well as plot color-magnitude diagrams). I used ground based data which were provided by CTIO 1.3m telescope; H and K band).
Space Astronomy Summer Program at STScI

In the summer of 2005, I had been at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, USA. I spent ten weeks supervised by Dr. Massimo Robberto. His main field of research was the photometric study of embedded clusters and star-forming regions. I was involved in project “HST Treasury Program on the Orion nebula”.

I had to analyze ACS/WFC data (in infrared channels) in order to identify/classify the infrared sources in M42 nebula. Due to this project, I had to learn IDL language. I made an HTML database for the project with an interactive surface availabe for internal use only. The results were presented at the “Summer Student Seminar”.
Undergraduate research at University of Szeged

Between 2002 and 2006, I had been involved in few scientific projects supervised by Balázs Csák and Dr. Zoltán Balog. During this period, I mainly focused on observations of variable stars, stellar cluster physics and NIR-astronomy. I learnt the basics of CCD photometry using IRAF and, as the part of multicolor photometry, I also learnt how to fit isochrones to color-magnitude and color-color diagrams. I was getting expereince about the standardization and extinctional corrections, too.

Later, I had also been involved in the fields of star formation, HII regions and interstellar medium (ISM), supervised by Dr. Zoltán Balog. My main responsibility was to solve the extinctional and standard transformational equations. The preliminary results were presented at the “Cores to Clusters” conference in Porto, Portugal.