Ashley Villar

Ashley Villar will be joining the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University under the supervision of Professor Brian Metzger. She is completing her Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she works with Professor Edo Berger to study the eruptions, explosions and collisions of stars. Villar completed her B.S. in physics at MIT. Her research interests lie at the intersection of astrophysics and machine learning. At Columbia, she will develop novel algorithms to classify the underlying physics of cosmic explosions and detect anomalous physics in real time.