Francisco Förster

Adjunct Professor

Background & Contact Information

Research Topics:

Website:

Areas of interest

My main research interests are supernova and astroinfomatics. In particular, I am interested in the early phases of evolution of supernova and their implications for progenitor studies. I am the principal investigator of the ALeRCE broker (https://alerce.science), a large interdisciplinary collaboration to ingest, annotate and classify alerts from large etendue survey streams, such as those from ZTF or LSST. I was also the principal investigator of the HiTS project, in which we pioneered the discovery of supernovae in real-time using DECam.

Biography

I did astronomy and engineering B.Sc. at U. of Chile between 1998 and 2003. Between 2004 and 2009 I did a D.Phil in physics at the U. of Oxford, on theoretical models of Type Ia supernova (SNe Ia) progenitors with Prof. Philipp Podsiadlowski. Between 2009 and 2010 I led the installation of a robotic telescope at CTIO. Between 2011 and 2013 I was a Fondecyt Postdoctoral fellow on the progenitors of SNe Ia. In 2013 I became a scientist at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) as a Fondecyt Initiation into Research Fellow. In 2017 I became an Associate Researcher at the Millennium Institute for Astrophysics (MAS). I have been awarded Quimal (2014, 2019) and Comité Mixto ESO Chile funds (2015, 2017). Since 2020 I am an adjunct professor at the Astronomy Dept. of U. Chile and a Fondecyt Regular Fellow.

Courses Taught and others

Principal Investigator of the Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events (ALeRCE) broker, see http://alerce.science/
Principal Investigator of the High cadence Transient Survey (HiTS), see http://alerce.science/high-cadence-transient-survey-hits/
Lecturer at Astroinformatics (AS4501), in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020.
Lecturer at the Harvard Chile School for Data Science in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Lecturer at the La Serena School for Data Science in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Attended the Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jun 2018.
Attended the Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers, Penn State, US, Jun 2013.

Publicaciones:

Förster, F., et al., The delay of shock breakout due to circumstellar material evident in most type II supernovae, 2018, Nature Astronomy, 122F.
Förster, F.; Maureira, J.C.; San Martı́n, J.; et al., The High Cadence Transient Survey (HiTS) – I. Survey design and supernova shock breakout constraints, 2016, ApJ, 832, 155F
Förster, F.; Lesaffre, P.; Podsiadlowski, Ph.; Symplified Hydrostatic Carbon Burning in White Dwarf Interiors; 2010, ApJS, Vol. 190, Issue 2.