Curriculum vitae
Abtin Shahidi.
Observational astrophysicist and statistical data scientist. Independent researcher in Riverside; formerly Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Riverside and Senior Data Scientist at VideoAmp.
Experience
- 2026 — present
Independent Researcher
Riverside, USA- Independent research on statistical methods for galaxy populations and for large-scale, incomplete data.
- 2025 — 2026
Postdoctoral Scholar
University of California, Riverside- Research on galaxy populations and statistical methods for large astronomical surveys.
- 2021 — 2024
Senior Data Scientist
VideoAmp- Demographic imputation across 120M U.S. households — Gibbs sampler for Bayesian non-parametric density estimation over nested missing data; tuned for ~10M data points and ~1M parameters.
- Identity graph construction — probabilistic framework for the evolution of interconnected bipartite graphs (100M nodes, 1B edges) with geographical consistency.
- Behavioral modeling — hierarchical Bayesian models on doubly stochastic Poisson point processes for purchase, digital activity, and TV viewership, over 100K+ time series.
- Survey-based lift methodology — projection framework estimating ad effectiveness via identity-graph matchability and observability.
- 2017 — 2021
Graduate Research Assistant
University of California, Riverside- Selection of massive evolved galaxies at 3 ≤ z ≤ 4.5 in the CANDELS fields (~250K real galaxies from CANDELS, ~1M real galaxies from COSMOS in addition to simulated galaxy samples from semi-analytical models, statistical learning).
- Hierarchical Bayesian modeling of star-forming sequences with environmental and cosmic-time dependence.
- 2016 — 2021
Teaching Assistant
University of California, Riverside- Introductory Physics & Laboratory, Interstellar Astrophysics, and Foundation of Applied Machine Learning.
Education
- 2017 — 2021
Ph.D., Physics & Astronomy
University of California, Riverside- Thesis: Statistical study of the galaxy populations at high redshift from multiwavelength catalogs.
- 2016 — 2017
M.Sc., Physics & Astronomy
University of California, Riverside - 2011 — 2015
B.Sc., Physics
Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
Honors & awards
- 2019–2020
NASA MIRO FIELDS Fellowship
Fellowships and Internships in Extremely Large Datasets - 2016
Dean's Distinguished Fellowship
University of California, Riverside - 2010
Silver medal
Iranian National Astronomy & Astrophysics Olympiad
Languages & tools
Programming
PythonStanSQLSparkRJuliaMathematicaMATLABLaTeXGNU/Linux
Libraries
NumPyPandasSciPyPyStanscikit-learnscikit-tdaTensorFlowTheanoPyMCPySparkprophetgiotto-tda
Observing
Telescope experience
3 nights — MOSFIRE on Keck II, Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi
2016 — Observational Astronomy Workshop, Lick Observatory
2016 — Observational Astronomy Workshop, Lick Observatory
Publications
Seven peer-reviewed papers in The Astrophysical Journal & Letters — cited 570+ times (h-index 6).
View publications