ABOUT ME

I'm a PhD student at Northwestern University's Department of Physics and Astronomy, working with Professor Adam Miller. I split my time between the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the SkAI Institute. I graduated with James Scholar Honors from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelors in Computer Science and Astronomy and a minor in Statistics. At Illinois I was a recipient of the Stanley Wyatt Memorial Award, presented to the graduating Astronomy major with the most outstanding GPA and track record of undergraduate research. During my time there, I also received the 2021 LSSTC Science Catalyst Grant, the 2022 Research Park Best Technical Innovator Award (Finalist), and the 2024 Preble Fellowship for my research and engineering work in multi-messenger astronomy and machine learning. I did my undergraduate thesis work with Professor Gautham Narayan, working on modelling kilonova discovery rates and developing new ML methods to find rare transients.

In the past, I have interned in both research and engineering roles at Country Financial, the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and IIT Bombay. Fundamentally, I am interested in applying computational methods to solve scientific problems.

RESEARCH

My research focuses on using machine learning and statistics to make sense of rapidly changing astronomical phenomena in large surveys. I work at the intersection of time-domain astronomy and computational astrophysics, building classification and anomaly-detection methods to identify rare or unusual transients—such as kilonovae and other explosive events—in massive data streams from projects like the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), and LS4. In the past, a major part of my work involved modeling kilonova discovery rates and developing methods to orchestrate follow-up observations, helping astronomers find electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational-wave events more efficiently.

PUBLICATIONS

You can find a complete list of my publication on Google Scholar, ADS, or on my CV.

Selected First Author Publications:

[3] Shah, V. G., Gagliano, A., Malanchev, K., Narayan, G., Malz, A., & the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (2025). ORACLE: A Real-Time, Hierarchical, Deep-Learning Photometric Classifier for the LSST. The Astrophysical Journal 995 (2025) 1, 4.

[2] Shah, V. G., Foley, R. J., Narayan, G. (2025). The Fastest Path to Discovering the Second Electromagnetic Counterpart to a Gravitational Wave Event. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 137(2), p.024101.

[1] Shah, V. G., Narayan, G., Perkins, H. M., Foley, R. J., Chatterjee, D., Cousins, B., & Macias, P. (2024). Predictions for electromagnetic counterparts to Neutron Star mergers discovered during LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing runs 4 and 5. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 528(2), 1109-1124.

REACH OUT

Feel free to reach out over email or LinkedIn if you want to chat!

Email: Northwestern Directory
LinkedIn: @vedgshah
Github: @dev-ved30
ORCiD: 0009-0009-1590-2318

PS: Direct email links are behind the Northwestern directory to keep the bots away 🤖