Gregory Sainton
Research Engineer in Machine Learning · LUX Team · Observatoire de Paris
With a PhD in Astrophysics and a background spanning supernova spectroscopy, Martian seismology, and radio astronomy, the common thread has always been the same: large, complex, noisy datasets, and the challenge of extracting something meaningful from them.
At Observatoire de Paris - PSL, within the LUX lab, current work is focused on the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) — an international project building the world’s largest radio telescope to address fundamental questions in astrophysics, from the formation of the first galaxies to the search for life in the Universe. With a collecting area equivalent to one square kilometre, a tremendous amount of data, making automated data processing a central challenge. The goal is to develop machine learning algorithms that can reliably find radio sources in this data.
Before joining Observatoire de Paris, five years were spent at IPGP working on planetary science missions: seismic data analysis for the NASA InSight mission in the SEIS team — including glitch detection and time management on Mars — and hardware integration of the FSS (Farside Seismic Suite) under NASA’s CLPS programme.
Research interests include unsupervised learning, diffusion models, signal processing, and ML applied to astrophysics and Earth observation.
And outside the lab — as an amateur trail runner slowly working toward longer and longer races — the habit of turning everything into a dataset has proven difficult to shake. Some things apparently carry over (see trail section).