Isabelle Santos

Background

About Isabelle Santos

I am passionate about teaching and I am currently doing outreach in astronomy as a freelance. I write outreach articles, as well as podcast and video scripts. I also do outreach live on Twitch. This experience has giving me practice explaining complex notions in simple terms. These skills are useful for writing documentation and for contributing to research documentation and presentations. I have an engineering degree in computer science from the French Aviation University. During my studies, I learned about electronics and low-level programming, which gave me a solid basis for understanding higher-level concepts. I also learned several programming languages, and studied operating systems, machine learning and high-performance computing. I then pursued a PhD in applied mathematics. This PhD program gave me the opportunity to put my programming skills to the test and tackle complex problems. I used Python (along with libraries such as numpy, matplotlib and FEniCS) to re-write and modernize legacy FORTRAN code from my lab, and to write my own applications. To keep track of modifications and different versions of my code and my articles (written with LaTeX), I used git. During my PhD, I studied to obtain a MSc in astrophysics. Through this experience, I became familiar with various astronomical concepts, learned about astronomical data, and extensively used astropy. After my PhD, I worked at the University of Geneva, where I implemented machine learning tools for astrophysicists preparing the Euclid space telescope. The Euclid data is not yet available (the spacecraft will be launched later this year), but the data processing pipelines need to be ready when it is. I used existing astronomical catalogs and simulated Euclid-like data to test the algorithms I implemented. My postdoctoral contract was rather short, so I was very careful to provide adequat tests and documentation so that my work could be used and maintained after my departure.