About Me

Hi! I'm Oliver Hall, an ESA Research Fellow at ESTEC, The Netherlands. My research focuses on a Bayesian ensemble analyses of stellar populations, and how this can improve our understanding of both analysis techniques and underlying physics.

I was born in Hong Kong, but did most of my growing up in the Netherlands. I obtained my MSci from the University of Birmingham in 2016, under supervision of Prof Bill Chaplin. I joined the Birmingham based Sun, Stars & Exoplanets (formerly HiROS) group in the same year as a PhD student under supervison of Dr Guy Davies. In 2020 I obtained my PhD and started as an ESA Reseach Fellow where I mainly work from my home office in the stunning city of Leiden (see background).

While waiting for my code to run I scroll through Twitter, and try to engage the public in astronomy where I can. In the past I've written for Astrobites, which you can read here. In the time I'm not busy with research or my toddler you can find me walking our springer spaniel or watching people play kaizo mario romhacks.

Research

I am usually throwing Hierarchical Bayesian Models at any stellar population problem I can find, and seeing if they stick. Right now, I'm looking at gyrochronological ages of stars observed by TESS and Gaia, how the luminosity of Red Clump giants changes with their metallicity, and how we can make robust stellar rotation measurements in TESS data.

A list of all papers I am currently (co-)author on can be found on NASA ADS. You can find a copy of a selection of talks I have given on my SpeakerDeck.

Image (c) University of Birmingham / Mark Garlick 2021

Code

I love writing and sharing accessible code, and hacking other peoples work to learn from theirs! I have written and contributed to some packages that may help others in their work. Below I provide links to a couple of repositories that can be found on my GitHub, and others I've formally contributed to.

Repository Description
lightkurve A beautiful package for Kepler and TESS time series analysis in Python.
PBJam Automated asteroseismic peak-bagging made easy.
michael Rotation measurements from eleanor TESS FFI light curves. Work in progress!
TASOC pipeline I contribute to the TASOC photometry and correction modules for TESS FFIs
State of the Universe Packaged, current astronomical information for planetarium speakers and other educators.

Curriculum Vitae