Aaron leads the data science side of our team, collaborating with researchers across Northwestern to elevate the impact of their data analysis efforts and visual communication. He brings many years of experience leading collaborative data science projects, developing and delivering technical skills-building workshops, facilitating research working groups, and mentoring researchers at all career levels. He also co-leads our Data Science Research Consultants Student Program, helping to advance the next generation of data scientists.
Aaron is also an expert in data visualization, having years of experience partnering with researchers to create innovative and impactful representations of complex datasets. His visualizations have had a broad impact, through press releases on major news outlets, within high-impact scientific journal articles, within public shows at the Adler Planetarium (Chicago) and the Hayden Planetarium (New York), and have also won multiple awards. One of Aaron's recent large projects is Firefly, a custom-built, cross-discipline, flexible visualization platform that allows users to interactively explore and manipulate multi-dimensional datasets with millions of observations, all from within a web browser. He is also well known for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA “Masses in the Stellar Graveyard” plot, that has been featured in countless astrophysics presentations, articles, textbooks and more. Many of Aaron’s visualization and data science products are available on his website, YouTube Channel and GitHub page.
Aaron also has a PhD in astrophysics and is a research faculty member in Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). He first joined Northwestern and CIERA in 2010, and over the years has led a research group studying the lives and deaths of stars and planets, and was the PI and site director for CIERA's Research Experiences for Undergraduate Students (REU) program.