Gaia People

Andrej Prsa

University of Ljubljana

Andrej Prsa graduated from the University of Ljubljana, Department of Astrophysics, under the supervision of Tomaz Zwitter. He specialised in the field of eclipsing binaries and is currently a postdoc at Villanova University, working on artificial intelligence approaches to a fully automated analysis of eclipsing binary light curves. As part of his PhD he wrote a modeling program called PHOEBE (PHysics Of Eclipsing BinariEs) that is built on top of the widely used Wilson-Devinney code. His primary interest in Gaia is the great challenge that will arise in creating an automatic reduction pipeline that would result in a catalogue of physical properties of the roughly 1 million eclipsing binaries that will be observed by Gaia. Coupled with experience from participating in CoRoT's Binary Thematic Team and computational background, Andrej also aims to contribute to Gaia's data reduction pipeline and to the calibration of astrometric distances using eclipsing binaries.

[Published: 01/11/2004 | Updated: 27/03/2007]