Ved Shah

# About Me

Hi! I'm Ved.

I'm a PhD student at Northwestern University specializing in Astrophysics x Machine Learning, 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 and the Preble Fellowship, presented to the graduating Astronomy major with the most outstanding GPA and track record of undergraduate research. I did my undergraduate thesis work with Professor Gautham Narayan, working on modelling kilonova detection rates and developing ML methods for transient discovery.

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. You can find more information about my work on my CV.

# 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 machine learning, building classification and anomaly-detection methods to identify rare or unusual transients 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 detection rates and developing strategies to maximize the chances of discovering electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events.

# Publications

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(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.

Since I am terrible at updating my publication list, you can find an automatically updated record on NASA ADS or Google Scholar.