Branimir Sesar

I am co-leading the European Research Council "Milky Way" group with Prof. Dr. Hans-Walter Rix. Currently, I am analyzing and modeling data emerging from the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) wide-area, time-domain survey, with a goal of constraining the formation history of the Milky Way. I often work with sparse time-series and model data using Bayesian and machine-learning techniques (e.g., classifiers and clustering algorithms). In addition to doing research, I am also mentoring undergraduate and graduate students.

At Caltech, I was co-leading the Galactic Structure Key Project within the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) collaboration with Prof. Judy Cohen. In order to support my research, I deployed a specialized databases that today holds over 12 billion observations of various astrophysical objects, and is still actively used by Caltech astronomers.

As a graduate student and UW, I managed, improved, and mined large data sets produced by wide-area, time-domain astrophysical surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR). As part of my doctoral dissertation, I searched for a rare type of stars in the Milky Way, called RR Lyrae stars, and used these stars to map the 3D structure of the Galaxy.