Ryan worked on the South Pole Telescope project for about ten years, and his connection to DES comes through early studies of how we might combine the DES and SPT datasets, e.g. measuring the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect from DES-selected galaxy clusters.
In the summer of 2015 he transitioned to a scientist position at Descartes Labs, a startup working at the intersection of remote sensing, machine learning, and agriculture.
We asked Ryan a few more questions — here’s what he had to say:
Do you have any hobbies or play any sports?
I play pickup soccer most weekends.
Do you have kids? Do they want to be scientists too?
She is only a few weeks old, so we’ll have to followup on that one.
Any advice for aspiring scientists?
Give cloud computing a try! You can do a lot on AWS or Google Cloud Platform for free, and you can probably convince your advisor to pay for more. No more waiting in university cluster queues.