Tyler Barna
PhD Student in Astrophysics at the University of Minnesota
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
| Jun 05, 2026 | I was awarded the Robert O. Pepin Fellowship by the University of Minnesota to support my graduate research over the summer. |
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| Apr 28, 2026 | I spent April 2026 in Italy as a visiting scholar at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), supported by the ACME Transnational Access program. While there, I worked on machine learning classifiers—including Random Forest and XGBoost models—and alert streaming tools using the Babamul Kafka consumer for rapid transient follow-up. |
| Oct 18, 2025 | I gave a contributed talk at the AstroRob VIII workshop on autonomous robotic observatories. I spoke about our work modernizing NASA’s General Coordinates Network (GCN) to support rapid alert distribution for time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy. |
| Jul 22, 2025 | My paper, IIb or not IIb: A Catalog of ZTF Kilonova Imposters, was accepted for publication by PASP. In this work, we present a catalog of Type IIb supernovae and other fast-evolving transients that can mimic kilonova light curves in wide-field surveys. |
| Jan 14, 2025 | I attended the 245th AAS meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, where I presented a poster on identifying Type IIb supernovae and other kilonova imposters in ZTF data. |