Tansu Daylan
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Welcome
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I am an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and a faculty fellow at the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. My research program is focused on two of our most fundamental questions about the cosmos: what is the particle nature of dark matter, and how common are Earth-like planets in the Universe?
To advance our prospects of revealing the particle nature of dark matter, I search for high-energy astrophysical signatures of dark matter, such as those accessible to the Fermi-LAT and study its structure using strong gravitational lenses, including those observed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and those that will be observed by the Roman Space Telescope and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Rubin Observatory. To address our knowledge gaps in planet formation and habitability, I discover and characterize exoplanets to improve our understanding of planet evolution, migration, and demographics. I have worked as a group vetting lead on NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), identifying TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs) that constitute a legacy catalog of exoplanet candidates likely to be transiting nearby stars and amenable to detailed characterization by JWST in the decades to come. To make progress on these scientific investigations, I build inference pipelines using Bayesian statistics, machine learning, and high-performance computing, analyzing and modeling various space- and ground-based astronomical data.​
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My research group at Washington University, AstroMusers, advances astrophysics in unique ways through the novel research questions we pose, the methodologies we develop, and the strong group culture we have fostered.
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About Me
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I joined the physics faculty at Washington University in August 2023. I was a postdoctoral LSST Discovery Alliance Fellow in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, working with Josh Winn between June 2022 and July 2023. Before that, I worked as a TESS postdoctoral associate (2021-2022) and a Kavli Fellow (2018-2021) in the Department of Physics and Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working with George Ricker and Sara Seager. Before my postdocs, I was a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics at Harvard University between 2013 and 2018, working at the Center for Astrophysics on developing statistical methods to search for dark matter signatures with my Ph.D. advisor, Douglas P. Finkbeiner. Accordingly, I lived in Boston between 2013 and 2021, in New York City between 2021 and 2023, and in St. Louis since then.
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My 2018 PhD thesis was A Transdimensional Perspective on Dark Matter. My academic genealogy traces back to Richard Crane (1907 – 2007), a physicist at the University of Michigan who advised David Todd Wilkinson (1935 - 2002), who received his PhD from the University of Michigan and became a professor at Princeton University in 1965. David went on to advise Marc Davis, who received his PhD from Princeton in 1973 and joined UC Berkeley in 1981. Marc then advised Doug, who received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1999, to become a professor at Harvard University in 2006.
I completed my undergraduate studies at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. I graduated from METU with a double major in electrical and electronics engineering and physics in 2012 and 2013, respectively. As an undergraduate, I was affiliated with CERN between 2011 and 2013, worked on the AMS-02 experiment on the International Space Station, and occasionally traveled to Geneva for research. Before that, I graduated from Robert College in 2008. Going further back, I was a curious child growing up in the beautiful city of Istanbul, with a few extended stays in Amsterdam, and I spent my summers mostly on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor.
Yet before that, I was a collection of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other heavier elements spread throughout the molecular cloud in the pre-Solar neighborhood that eventually ignited our Sun and formed our planet Earth. Overall, I am a self-conscious and inquiring ingredient of our Universe, pondering its constituents, origin, evolution, and elegant symmetries.
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I have a deep interest in world history. As a child, walking within the ruins of various ancient cities in Asia Minor has fascinated me and thus strongly shaped how I view our place in the Universe. I also have a strong attitude towards all pseudosciences and the cognitive biases they exploit to influence the worldviews and decisions of the members of our society.
