Patrick D. Aleo

Patrick is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a double Bachelor's degree in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2017. As an undergraduate, Patrick determined chemical abundances of planet host stars XO-2, identified six unique line-blended Fe II lines in partly explaining the over-excitation/chemical abundance discrepancy in K-dwarf and Hyades star spectra, and used machine learning techniques to perform blind, data-based nucleosynthetic archetypal discovery on the Hypatia Catalog, JINAbase, and APOKASC. Recently Patrick helped apply the Mask R-CNN instance segmentation framework to astronomical images to deblend and classify stars and galaxies. He is currently working with the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to develop a pipeline to automate, inform, and improve astrophysical data visualization using machine learning.