I am actively working on both machine learning and astrophysical research. In the last year, I have primarily focused on scientific machine learning.
The most up-to-date list of my publications can be found on ADS or arXiv.
machine learning research 🤖ðŸ§
1 independent paper
Neural ODEs/PDEs
Using neural networks as individual terms within ODEs/PDEs to learn physics from data.
- Application of neural astrophysical wind models to real observations (in prep., stay tuned!)
Cohere Large Language Model Embeddings
I’m studying NLP and LLMs through courses by Cohere and DeepLearning.ai. Interested in mechanistic interpretability (no project started yet, but actively reading about the topic.)
As we would expect, sentences with capybaras are clustered together and sentences with galaxies are clustered together. Sentences containing both capybaras and galaxies (the latter two questions), fall in between within the PCA-reduced space.
Protein Function Prediction
Kaggle CAFA 5 protein prediction competition: As a part of the Erdos Institute Data Science Bootcamp, my team and I studied how to develop models for protein function prediction using frequently occuring protein labels from T5, ESM2, and ProtBERT pre-trained embeddings.
Our project placed within the Top 5 projects, out of 33 teams, of the bootcamp.
astrophysics research ðŸ”🌌
4 first author papers, 2 co-author papers
The bulk of my thesis research is focused on developing models that explain observations of galactic starburst winds. This is important because galactic winds, or outflows, are closely related to how galaxies evolve. Below is an example of output from a Cholla simulation. These are 2D slices through the 3D volume for several different thermodynamic quantities. The plot showcases highly mass-loaded flows undergoing an instability and becoming unstable to cool filament formation (Nguyen+2023).
One of my favorite papers I wrote is listed below. In this short 5 page paper, we derive analytic solutions from steady-state coupled ODEs, verify them using time-dependent 3D simulations, and then highlight the observational characteristics of the models to be used in comparison to forthcoming data from future space missions.
- Dynamics of hot galactic winds launched from spherically-stratified starburst cores
- Nguyen, Thompson, Schneider, Lopez, and Lopez
- Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society Letters (2023)
My 3D time-dependent simulations are done using GPU-accelerated astrophysical code “Cholla” (primarily in C++ for the version I used). Analysis of simulation results is always done using Python. For works ofcused on semi-analaytic models, the steady-state coupled ODEs are solved in either Julia, JAX, or Python.