Luke T. Maud

Welcome

I am currently working as a Postdoc at Allegro, the Dutch ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) based at the Leiden Observatory, in the Netherlands. Primarily, my work involves the investigation of atmospheric conditions above ALMA along with my support scientist roll. I lead the Phase Metrics and WVR project at Allegro, we study the data from long observations of Quasars to understand the phase fluctuations in the troposphere as a function of time and conditions (wind speed, pressure, temperature, water vapour content). A better understanding of the conditions and their variability and any connection with the atmospheric variations can help to better understand when certain observations can be undertaken. As part of the WVR project, a study was conducted to investigate the scaling fo the WVR solutions, where it was found that phase stability and corrections can be improved using this technique. The paper is now published (see Publications) and there is a publicly available tarball for the scaling analysis package here: WVR scaling.

I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds under the supervision of Prof Melvin Hoare and Dr Stuart Lumsden. I submitted my thesis in early September 2013 and defended my work in December 2013. I continued as a Postdoc for one year at Leeds before moving to Leiden in September 2014. My scientific research backround is in the field of Massive Star Formation, specifically, using interferometers and single dish telescopes at sub-mm/mm wavelengths.

My PhD research involved two key projects. The first focussing on high angular resolution observations of MYSOs at millimetre wavelengths, with data from CARMA, SMA and ATCA interferometers. The second project involves the analysis of single dish JCMT observations of a large sample of MYSOs. For more information follow the link to my research.

Before starting my PhD I moved to Madrid for a 6 month period where I worked with Dr's Bruno Merin and Hervy Bouy at the European space astronomy centre as a trainee. This project involved studying the evolution of circumstellar discs around young protostars in nearby regions. The full work is now published here

I graduated from the University of Leeds in 2009 with an MPhys in Astrophysics. During my final year project working with Prof. Oudmaijer, I undertook the first reduction of VLT/CRIRES spectra targeting the CO bandhead emission (at 2.3 microns) in a sample of massive young stellar objects (MYSOs) selected from the RMS Survey. The full sample has now been reduced and the published paper can be found here.