Jessica Werk

Jessica Werk is an assistant professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington. She is currently building a research group focused on how galaxies acquire, eject, and recycle their gas over cosmic history.

She combines data from the Hubble Space Telescope in the ultraviolet wavebands with spectra of thousands of galaxies taken with world-class ground-based telescopes such as Keck and Gemini. To physically interpret the observations, she directly compares them with cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations that resolve baryonic structure on the same scales.

Professor Werk is particularly interested in applications of machine learning to identify specific atomic transitions in high-resolution, high signal-to-noise quasar spectra, and in new data visualization techniques that can be applied to complex, multi-layered datasets.