Bio.

I'm a seaasoned data scientist and leader currently working in the healthcare space at apree health. I received my PhD in Astrophysics at Yale University where I disentangled magnetohydrodynamic stellar signals from those of planets, co-founded planethunters.org, and discovered new worlds using data from the Keck Telescope in Hawai'i.

In addition to astrophysics and healthcare, I'm passionate about using data science social good and work with non-profits and NGOs to help realize the potential benefits that data science can provide to humanity.

Code

pyutil
pyutil is a python library of utilities for general and astrophysical purposes. It contains generalized code for connecting to a database, removing the blaze function from echelle spectra, and calculating the p-value of a linear correlation via bootstrap samplings.
limbDarkening
A python wrapper for calculating limb darkening coefficients using the Claret models. This includes code for working with data taken with commonly used broadband filters, several spacecraft, and the MOST spacecraft.
electric
My mother-in-law and I were wondering which state had the most expensive electric rates (adjusted for median household income). I spent a Sunday afternoon looking into it. This blog post contains my findings, and includes several interactive Tableau visualizations showing electric rates and energy usage by state.
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KFME
Keplerian Fitting Made Easy (KFME) started as an interactive graphical user interface to model combined synthetic astrometric and radial velocity time series data from NASA's Space Interferometry Mission. It includes many useful statistical tools for searching for planetary signals within time series radial velocity measurements, and calculating the p-values for each planetary signal.
VUMPS
I wrote the reduction and commissioning code for the VUMPS Spectrometer in IDL. This was based on much of the work I did on the reduction and commissioning code for CHIRON, which was based on code used for other spectrometers and the REDUCE package
New Haven Report Card
I participated in the 2015 Yale Data Hackathon, where I was part of a group that made a "report card" card for the City of New Haven. My role included developing code for extracting data from the SeeClickFix API, cleaning and transforming it, and loading it into a MySQL database. I also made the front end, and interactive visualizations using Bootstrap, D3.js, jQuery, and PHP.

Side Projects

doglodge.io
A web app for finding the most dog-friendly hotels at a given destination. The algorithm behind the back-end uses TFIDF, LinearSVC, and NearestCentroid from scikit-learn, and the front-end is generated using Bootstrap and Flask.
New Haven Report Card
I participated in the 2015 Yale Data Hackathon, where I was part of a group that made a "report card" card for the City of New Haven. My role included developing code for extracting data from the SeeClickFix API, cleaning and transforming it, and loading it into a MySQL database. I also made the front end, and interactive visualizations using Bootstrap, D3.js, jQuery, and PHP.
electric
My mother-in-law and I were wondering which state had the most expensive electric rates (adjusted for median household income). I spent a Sunday afternoon looking into it. This blog post contains my findings, and includes several interactive Tableau visualizations showing electric rates and energy usage by state.
show more
ChironEnviron
An interactive web app that allows users to view the environmental time series data for the CHIRON Spectrometer. The site and data pipeline were made using Bootstrap, D3.js, PHP, MySQL, python, jQuery, and shell scripts.
VUMPS
I wrote the reduction and commissioning code for the VUMPS Spectrometer in IDL. This was based on much of the work I did on the reduction and commissioning code for CHIRON, which was based on code used for other spectrometers and the REDUCE package
XKCD Downloader
Code to download all of the XKCD comics and their alt-text lines. Makes use of BeautifulSoup for scraping, argparse, and urllib2. Great for screen savers!

Publications

Newly Discovered Planets Orbiting HD 5319, HD 11506, HD 75784 and HD 10442 from the N2K Consortium
Initially designed to discover short-period planets, the N2K campaign has since evolved to discover new worlds at large separations from their host stars. Detecting such worlds will help determine the giant planet occurrence at semi-major axes beyond the ice line, where gas giants are thought to mostly form. Here we report four newly discovered gas giant planets (with minimum masses ranging from 0.4 to 2.1 M Jup) orbiting stars monitored as part of the Next 2000 target stars (N2K) Doppler Survey program. Two of these planets orbit stars already known to host planets: HD 5319 and HD 11506. The remaining discoveries reside in previously unknown planetary systems: HD 10442 and HD 75784. The refined orbital period of the inner planet orbiting HD 5319 is 641 days. The newly discovered outer planet orbits in 886 days. The large masses combined with the proximity to a 4:3 mean motion resonance make this system a challenge to explain with current formation and migration theories. HD 11506 has one confirmed planet, and here we confirm a second. The outer planet has an orbital period of 1627.5 days, and the newly discovered inner planet orbits in 223.6 days. A planet has also been discovered orbiting HD 75784 with an orbital period of 341.7 days. There is evidence for a longer period signal; however, several more years of observations are needed to put tight constraints on the Keplerian parameters for the outer planet. Lastly, an additional planet has been detected orbiting HD 10442 with a period of 1043 days.
Giguere, Matthew J.; Fischer, Debra A.; Payne, Matthew J.; Brewer, John M.; Johnson, John Asher; Howard, Andrew W.; Isaacson, Howard T.
The Astrophysical Journal, 799, 1, 2015
CHIRON TOOLS: Integrated Target Submission, Scheduling and Observing Systems for a High-Resolution Fiber-Fed Spectrograph
The CHIRON spectrometer is a new high-resolution, fiber-fed instrument on the 1.5 m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-America Observatory (CTIO). To optimize use of the instrument and limited human resources, we have designed an integrated set of Web applications allowing target submission, observing script planning, nightly script execution and logging, and access to reduced data by multiple users. The unified and easy-to-use interface has dramatically reduced the time needed to submit and schedule observations and improved the efficiency and accuracy of nightly operations. We present our experience to help astronomers and project managers who need to plan for the scope of effort required to commission a queue-scheduled facility instrument.
Brewer, John M.; Giguere, Matthew; Fischer, Debra A.
PASP 2014
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A High-eccentricity Component in the Double-planet System around HD 163607 and a Planet around HD 164509
We report the detection of three new exoplanets from Keck Observatory. HD 163607 is a metal-rich G5IV star with two planets. The inner planet has an observed orbital period of 75.29 ± 0.02 days, a semi-amplitude of 51.1 ± 1.4 m s-1, an eccentricity of 0.73 ± 0.02, and a derived minimum mass of MP sin i = 0.77 ± 0.02 M Jup. This is the largest eccentricity of any known planet in a multi-planet system. The argument of periastron passage is 78.7 ± 2fdg0; consequently, the planet's closest approach to its parent star is very near the line of sight, leading to a relatively high transit probability of 8%. The outer planet has an orbital period of 3.60 ± 0.02 years, an orbital eccentricity of 0.12 ± 0.06, and a semi-amplitude of 40.4 ± 1.3 m s-1. The minimum mass is MP sin i = 2.29 ± 0.16 M Jup. HD 164509 is a metal-rich G5V star with a planet in an orbital period of 282.4 ± 3.8 days and an eccentricity of 0.26 ± 0.14. The semi-amplitude of 14.2 ± 2.7 m s-1 implies a minimum mass of 0.48 ± 0.09 M Jup. The radial velocities (RVs) of HD 164509 also exhibit a residual linear trend of -5.1 ± 0.7 m s-1 year-1, indicating the presence of an additional longer period companion in the system. Photometric observations demonstrate that HD 163607 and HD 164509 are constant in brightness to submillimagnitude levels on their RV periods. This provides strong support for planetary reflex motion as the cause of the RV variations.
Giguere, Matthew J.; Fischer, Debra A.; Howard, Andrew W.; Johnson, John A.; Henry, Gregory W.; Wright, Jason T.; Marcy, Geoffrey W.; Isaacson, Howard T.; Hou, Fengji; Spronck, Julien
The Astrophysical Journal 2012

Teaching

I have taught physics and astronomy courses at San Francisco State University and Yale University. In addition to the traditional lecturing at a board, I have also mentored several students at both Universities, tutored, and hosted free sessions for the public at the planetariums and observatories.