Anastasios (Andy) Tzanidakis is a DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Astronomy from the University of Washington, under his Ph.D. thesis advisor, Professor James Davenport, where he focused on the characterization and discovery of circumstellar dust through rare stellar occultations found in all-sky surveys. As a DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow, Anastasios’s current work focuses on planet formation, particularly the final stages of terrestrial planet assembly through violent giant impacts between planets in the DiRAC Time-Domain group. His research focuses on the discovery and characterization of giant impacts, though ground- and space-based time-domain surveys search for irregular variability in young stars. Anastasios is particularly interested in utilizing machine learning and anomaly detection methods to analyze large, irregularly sampled time-series data to enable the discovery of such rare cosmic collisions, and broader applications to time-domain astronomy and data science.
Anastasios (Andy) Tzanidakis
