Lukas Welzel

Hi, nice to meet you! I’m a PhD student with Melissa McClure at Leiden Observatory, working on the vertical structure and composition of planet-forming disks.

I mostly look at edge-on disks, the ones polite enough to show us their side profile, to figure out where the ices sit, how far up they’re stirred, and what that means for the planets assembling underneath. The ices are the good part: whatever gets locked into a grain out there is a decent chunk of what ends up in an exoplanet’s atmosphere later.

I will talk your ear off about deep learning, especially where it touches disks and exoplanet imaging and characterization. My favorite pastime is convincing astronomers to adopt more of it (still impossible), though it’s easier now that I have a neural operator doing radiative transfer some ten billion times faster than the simulator. Let me shoehorn reinforcement learning into more of planet formation and we will become unstoppable. Hot take: PyTorch > NumPy also for computational physics (praise SGD).

Two truths and a lie: I don’t get too excited about tangents during my research, I’ve worked on high-powered cryogenic rocket engines, and the UN Security Council exempted me from the knowledge embargo on nuclear technology.

You can find more information about me, my projects and wonderful teams on this website.