Congratulations to Michelle Lochner! From the 14th of April, we are thrilled to be welcoming her at the department. She did her undergraduate in physics and maths at Rhodes University and moved on to do her honours with NASSP at UCT in 2010. She stayed at UCT for a masters in cosmology, later upgrading to a Ph.D. supervised by Prof. Bruce Bassett which she finished in 2014. After that she took up a postdoc at University College London with Prof. Hiranya Peiris, working on supernova classification with machine learning. In 2016 she returned to South Africa with a joint research position between the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, focusing on the development of statistical and machine learning algorithms for astronomy. See https://astro.uwc.ac.za/michelle-lochner/ for more details on research interests and activities.
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