I write code, mostly in Python and Javascript. I work at EMBL-EBI — the European Bioinformatics Institute. I previously did a PhD in astrophysics research and then worked at a startup.
You can find my email on GitHub. Or: it looks like sandyrogers, an @ looks like an a, and I own this domain.
At EMBL-EBI, I’m a scientific software web developer on MGnify, the platform for analysis, archival, and discovery of metagenomic data.
Our codebase is largely open source, and the web service side of our work is mostly Python/Django, javascript/backbone.js and React.js. EBI run their own computing cluster and data centre, so the service’s underlying data is provided by many tools, languages, and workflows.
My PhD was at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. My project mostly used the Hubble Space Telescope to look at very distance galaxies. They are far enough away that we look back into the early Universe when we see them (within the first billion years of its 13 billion year history).
We looked for the earliest, faintest galaxies we could find (a few hundred of them at redshift 5 to 9). By carefully measuring their colours and comparing them to computer models of stars and galaxies, we worked out the galaxies’ stellar populations — the types of stars they contained. The tricky parts were working with very faint galaxies in very noisy image data, measuring colours without bias, and figuring out both the distance to the galaxies as well as their properties (they can have similar patterns).
My thesis is available. My papers are on ADS.
The most important results of my thesis are in this paper:
Rogers, A. B., et al. “The colour distribution of galaxies at redshift five.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 440.4 (2014): 3714-3725.
ADS
Sometimes I write things on Medium, like this post about making F1 more competitive. In that one, I used a historical F1 database to look at how competitive races need to be for teams to win championship points.
Sometimes I post on Mastodon.
Some of my side projects are on Github, like this repo for that F1 data analysis project.