About Me

Recorded Talks and Press

About Me

I am a fifth year PhD student in the Astronomy Department at Caltech working with Shri Kulkarni, Kareem El-Badry, and Tom Prince. I’m also fortunate to be an NSF Graduate Fellow, Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, and LSST-DA (formerly LSSTC) Data Science Fellow.

I work on discovering and characterizing accreting binary stars: from the highly magnetic to the ultracompact, and even on stellar mass black holes.

My work primarily relies on a multiwavelength crossmatch between X-rays from the SRG/eROSITA mission and optical data from the Zwicky Transient Facility and Gaia, though I also use data from other X-ray, optical, and radio telescopes. I am broadly interested in extracting scientific use out of large astronomical datasets, and have shown that a simple tool in the X-ray + optical sky can efficiently reveal the true demographics of accreting white dwarfs in the solar neighborhood.

I’m originally from the town (small city) of Salinas, California and then completed my undergraduate education in the Physics Department at Stanford.

Publications

Read about my work on ADS

Curriculum Vitae

My CV can be viewed here.

Contact Info

Email: acrodrig “at” caltech.edu