Dr. Rutger van Haasteren

I grew up in the Hague (Netherlands), close to which I studied theoretical physics at Leiden University. I obtained my masters and PhD under the supervision of Yuri Levin in Astrophysics, with a thesis called "Gravitational-Wave detection and data analysis for pulsar timing arrays" (2011). In this work I describe the foundation of the (Bayesian) searches that is still being used by pulsar timing array projects today.

Between 2011-2013 I worked at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover to continue my research on Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) in Bruce Allen's group, where I had the position of postdoc, until I moved to Pasadena (CA) to join Caltech/Jet Propulsion Lab as an NSF Einstein Fellow 2013-2016. During this time I worked on foundational data analysis aspects of the NANOGrav collaboration to detect gravitational waves using pulsars.

Between 2016-2021 I worked at Microsoft (WA) as a senior data scientist, working on topics in Machine Learning: text analysis using large language models (LLM) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, various classification methods, and reinforcement learning for ad optimization.

From 2022 onwards I joined the Albert Einstein Institute again in Hannover, working with Bruce Allen to start a new group on pulsar timing array data analysis methods and gravitational-wave detection.