Tyler Barna

PhD Student in Astrophysics at the University of Minnesota

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John T. Tate Hall 201-06

116 Church St SE

Minneapolis, MN 55455

About me

As an undergraduate, I developed a strong interest in observational astronomy. At Princeton, I worked with Dr Melinda Soares-Furtado, then a PhD candidate, compiling a catalog of periodic variables in open clusters from Kepler K2 observations. Following that, I worked with Professor Saurabh Jha at Rutgers University on a senior honors thesis fitting the early time lightcurves of Type Ia supernovae from TESS data to search for potential companion signatures. After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Astrophysics at Rutgers University in 2021, I joined the Astrophysics PhD program at UMN.

Since starting at UMN, I’ve worked with Professor Michael Coughlin to develop a pipeline to automate ZTF follow-up observations of potential companions to gravitational wave sources detected by LIGO.

Personal Life

I spent the bulk of my childhood in a New Jersey suburb near Philadelphia and aspired to study astronomy from an early age; after graduating high school, I began my undergraduate degree at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where I was a member of the Honors College. Moving to Minnesota has been the first time I’ve lived outside of New Jersey, and I’ve enjoyed discovering more about the Twin Cities in the time I’ve been here. In my spare time, I enjoy cooking, collecting records, watching films, playing the guitar, and reading.

news

Oct 7, 2022 I won the Departmental 3 Minute Thesis Competition! I presented my work on the nmma fitting pipeline.
Oct 1, 2022 Welcome to my new website! I figured it’s about time I put together something decent to showcase my work. I’m still working on it, so please excuse any mess. I’ll be adding more content soon.

selected publications

  1. An Online Framework for Fitting Fast Transient Lightcurves
    Tyler Barna, Brandon Reed, and Michael W. Coughlin
    in prep. 2022
  2. NMMA: A nuclear-physics and multi-messenger astrophysics framework to analyze binary neutron star mergers
    Peter T. H. Pang, Tim Dietrich, Michael W. Coughlin, and 18 more authors
    arXiv e-prints May 2022
  3. VizieR Online Data Catalog: K2 periodic variables in M35 & NGC2158 (Soares-Furtado+, 2020)
    M. Soares-Furtado, J. D. Hartman, W. Bhatti, and 3 more authors
    VizieR Online Data Catalog Apr 2020