About me

Welcome, and thank you for visiting my website. My name is Sinan (pronounced as ‘Sinan’), and I am a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech as part of the PHANGS-HST team (PI: Dr. Janice Lee). You can access our paper on the morphological analysis of unresolved star clusters and stellar associations in the PHANGS-HST sample in Publications. We are currently working on a paper performing a joint analysis of HST/ALMA/VLT-MUSE observations, details of which shall soon be posted in the Portfolio tab.

I received my PhD in Physics from the University of Kansas (KU), Department of Physics & Astronomy, where I’ve worked with Prof. Gregory Rudnick on the stellar populations of intermediate redshift (z ~ 0.6) galaxies. Please peruse our paper on the characterization of the interacting/merging subpopulation of the ESO Distant Cluster Survey (EDisCS) sample in my Publications, and our upcoming paper on the stellar populations of the same sample as inferred via full spectrum fitting in Portfolio.

Prior to starting my PhD studies at KU, I received my Bachelor and Master of Science degrees from Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi / Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ/METU), Department of Physics. My research area during my time at ODTÜ/METU was theoretical high energy physics. My Master’s dissertation was on quantum geometrical phases and magnetic monopoles, working with Prof. Bayram Tekin.

My research interests mainly lie in the domain of galaxy evolution. My research recently has heavily focused on star formation in galaxies both nearby and distant. In conjuction with my research in astrophysics, I am passionate about statistical data analysis and machine learning techniques. My current focus on the machine learning front is developing interpretable machine learning frameworks for robust scientific inquiry.