Welcome!

I am a Postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics at the Computational Research Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and a Research Associate at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Before completing a postdoc in the Weizmann Institute experimental astrophysics group and a PhD at University College London (UCL), I graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure (France), and took part in several research projects in the BIPAC institute at University of Oxford (UK), the Alcator C-mod project at MIT (Massachussetts, USA), and the seismology group at the Midi-Pyrenees Observatory (France).

My main scientific interests are related to "transients" science, and to "big-data" astrophysics:

• "Transients" are short and often violent deep sky astrophysical phenomena that happen on timescales of seconds to years. My research focuses on "interacting Supernovae", a class of Supernovae that explode in thick clouds of gas (Soumagnac et al., 2019, Soumagnac et al.,2020) and on comparing theoretical models of the very early phases of stellar explosions to observations (Soumagnac et al.,2020). I am actively involved in the Zwicky Transient Facility and served as assistant Project Scientist of the ULTRASAT mission, a scientific satellite aimed at capturing signals from gravitational waves and supernovae.

• As larger and larger volumes of astronomical data become available, Astrophysics is said to have entered a "big-data area". I am involved in large astronomical surveys (e.g. Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) and using analysis tools from the field of big-data science and high-performance computing, in order to process, investigate and analyze large astronomical data sets (e.g. star-galaxy classification with machine learning for the Dark Energy Survey - Soumagnac et al., 2013, cross matching large astronomical catalogs - Soumagnac & Ofek, 2018 and learning from the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations probe in the BOSS survey - Soumagnac, Barkana, Sabiu et al. 2016, Soumagnac, Sabiu, Barkana et al. 2018).