Afterwards, Brian moved to South Africa and worked for the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town where he did astrophysics research. While in South Africa he obtained a Master of Science degree from the University of Kwazulu-Natal from the School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science. His thesis work focused on using the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect to try and establish a relationship between an optical and radio frequency phenomenon that would provide a way to detect all massive galaxies across the visible universe. This work was published in the peer-reviewed Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
From there Brian worked briefly at the Gemini North observatory in Hawaii before starting as a Scientific Data Analyst for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Virginia, USA. As an analyst he helped validate the data coming from the telescope which furthered his interest in the underlying physics and algorithms used to interpret the data. To that end, he moved to the Socorro office of NRAO to work in the Algorithms Research and Development Group. There he worked with a small team to characterize the polarization properties of the antennas of the Very Large Array (VLA), to help remove any polarization contamination by the telescope from observations. This research was published in the peer-reviewed Astronomical Journal.
Brian was then encouraged to get his PhD in Computer Science from NMT. He works with Dr. Ramyaa from the CS Department and Dr. Urvashi Rau from the NRAO. He is currently working on training machine learning models to make complex decisions related to processing scientific data before it can be used for research, something that typically requires large teams of scientists, software developers, and analysts to navigate. Brian has presented his research this past August in Sapporo, Japan at the International Union of Radio Science general assembly meeting.
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