Modern sky surveys can image the entire sky every night. In doing so, they discover new cosmic explosions - from stars collapsing to stars being devoured by black holes. But the sky is vast and the alerts are many - far too many for humans to keep up with. When the Vera Rubin Observatory opens its dome in 2025, millions of nightly discoveries will flood astronomers. Partnering with experts in sky surveys and applied machine learning, Dr Stevance is developing a Virtual Research Assistant that harnesses A.I. to help experts find the cosmic explosions that made the space dust we come from.
Dr Stevance is a researcher at the boundary of Astrophysics and Statistical Learning. She earned her PhD in 2019 from the University of Sheffield working on the shape of supernova explosions, before moving to Auckland University (NZ) to study the genealogy of kilonovae (neutron star mergers). She is now working for the ATLAS sky survey team at the University of Oxford to create automated systems that assist astronomers in their discovery of these stellar explosions. She also has close to a decade of science communication experience; she was awarded the title of Beatrice Tinsley Lecturer 2021 by the Royal Astronomical society of New Zealand, and in October 2024 was a guest panelist on BBC Sky at Night
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