Christina Kay
725 Commonwealth Ave., Astronomy Dept., Boston University, Boston, MA, 02134
Phone: (951) 941-5772 || Email: ckay@bu.edu || Web: people.bu.edu/ckay || LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ckay314
Technology Summary
Work Experience
Programming
Proficient in Python, IDL, Fortran,
CUDA
Experience with Matlab, Java,
JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Bash
(including awk)
Software
Microsoft Office, Keynote, Pages,
Gimp/Photoshop, TecPlot, Emacs,
Gedit
Skills
Parallel Programming (GPU and
CPU), Object-Oriented
Programming, Event-Driven
Programming, Computational
Physics, Computational Fluid
Dynamics, some GUI development
Systems
Unix/Linux, Mac, Windows
Forecasting a CME’s Altered Trajectory (ForeCAT) [July 2012 present, Boston University] - Scientific simulation developed to
predict the defection of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) based on
the magnetic forces of the solar background
• Initially implemented in IDL but converted to Python to
allow for more potential users
• Object-oriented - Given the acceleration from background
forces the CME object determines it’s new position/
orientation determined from simple kinematic equations
• Designed to be highly computationally efficient to allow
for potential future use for real time space weather
predictions
• Parallelized to run on GPU using pyCUDA
• Approximate 17x speedup on low-end NVIDIA GPU
• Modular design to allow for easy replacement of the
various physics-based models used for the solar
background and CME expansion and propagation
• Developed GPU algorithm to reduce the complexity of the
solar magnetic field model calculation from O(n2) to O(n)
• Developed GUI to facilitate the initial placement of
ForeCAT CMEs
Education
Boston University - Ph.D. in Astronomy
expected December 2015
Boston University - M.A. in Astronomy
received September 2012
UC Berkeley - A.B. in Physics and
Astronomy
SWMF CME Simulations [January 2011- July 2012, Boston
University] - Ran a sophisticated magnetohydrodynamic
simulation and analyzed the results
• Experience with SSH and use of a remote supercomputer
• Used the 3D plotting software TecPlot to visualize large
(~GB) data cubes
• Experience with contours, isosurfaces, streamlines,
interpolation
Academic Accomplishments
Galactic Cluster Data Analysis [May 2009 - July 2010, UC
Riverside] - Used several online databases to look for trends in the
properties of galactic clusters
• Acquired basic bash skills
• Manipulation of large text data files using awk and sed
Published 1 paper, 2 additional currently
under review
Gave 10 presentations at various
conferences/workshops
Presented posters at 10 different
conferences/workshops
Universe Adventure Website [Spring 2007, UC Berkeley] Helped maintain and improve a website directed at explaining
cosmology to a wider audience