I’m Prashin (Prash) Jethwa: an astrophysicist in the stellar dynamics group at the University of Vienna.

I develop open-source software and statistical methods for astrophysics, making heavy use of Probabilistic Programming Languages (PPLs) such as Stan and numpyro. I also work with mathematicians within the inter-discipinary project Tomography Across the Scales, developing bespoke algorithms to solve large-scale inverse problems.

Astrophysically, my broad research goal is to understand galaxy evolution in a cosmological context. I look for observational signatures of hierarchical build-up of galaxies using stellar kinematics, populations, and combined population-dynamical modelling. I also investigate galactic satellites systems, e.g. to constrain the nature of dark matter. This work spans Milky Way and Local Group (using resolved star data from large survey) and extragalactic systems (using integrated-light data from Integral Field Spectroscopy).

Publications

Check my orcID for an up-to-date list of publications.

Teaching

A history of courses I have taught at University of Vienna.

As a lecturer:

• Open Source Software Development for Astronomy (Winter 23/24)
• Introduction to Computational Astrophysics (Summer 23)
• Computational Concepts in Astronomy and Geosciences (Winter 21/22)
• A Bayesian Toolkit Applied to Dynamics of Stellar Clusters (Summer 21)

In exercise classes:

• Numerical Methods (Winter 19/20)

Software

I have two open-source software projects:

• popkinmocks, a toolkit to create models of the stellar content of galaxies and produce mock observations of Integral Field Unit (IFU) datacubes.
• DYNAMITE, software for orbit-based modelling of galaxies.

I also teach a course in Open Source Software Development for Astronomers. This course, for PhD and masters students, is based on the Code/Astro workshop.

Contact

• email: prashin dot jethwa at univie dot ac dot at
• telephone: +43 1 4277 53816
• address: Dept. of Astrophysics, 1180 Vienna, Türkenschanzstraße 17, Austria