waqas bhatti

Hi! I'm Waqas Bhatti, a software developer based in Toronto, Canada. I recently left academia after deciding I wanted to try something new.

Astrophysics work at Princeton University

I was a research scientist (three years as a postdoc and four years as an Associate Research Scholar) in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. I worked with Prof. Gaspar Bakos' HAT Surveys research group on the HATNet, HATSouth, and the upcoming HATPI exoplanet transit survey projects. I built a real-time monitoring and control interface for our robotic telescopes, managed our fleet of data-reduction servers, and maintained our websites. I built an interactive data exploration portal for the light curves from the HATNet and HATSouth surveys. Other research projects included looking for and classifying variable stars using the HATNet and HATSouth surveys, and building a photometric pipeline for the HATPI survey.

PhD thesis work at JHU

My thesis research was on the identification and characterization of variable point sources found in a large set of time-series photometry data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.