About

Hi! I am Simon. For as long as I can remember I have been passionate about science, especially astronomy. I always wanted to become an astronomer. That journey officially began when I started by BSc in Physics at KU Leuven in Belgium back in 2019. After graduating with MSc in Astronomy & Astrophysics, I moved to Canada to pursue a PhD at Western University, which is what I'm doing now.

Aside from astronomy, I also love games and game development. Around the age of 14 I started playing around with Python. A year or two later, I got into 3D modelling in Blender. It is this combined interest in astronomy and game development that eventually led to the creation of my YouTube channel. In 2022, Grant Sanderson – well known for his amazing YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown – organized the Summer of Math Exposition: a open contest for people to create math-related content. This was exactly the push I needed to make a video about a project I had just completed: a real-time black hole in Unity. One year later, I decided to revisit that project, and take it one step further. I remade the black hole from scratch and added an accretion disk, along with a lot more physics. I spent the summer creating a 7-part series of videos explaining in detail how it was made.

My first exposure to astronomical research was during my BSc, where I searched for post-AGB binary stars in Gaia data. In my MSc, I was more involved in research. I had the chance to go observing at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on one of the Canary Islands and collect my own data for research. I decided to spend this time on investigating the presence of large carbonaceous molecules (specifically hexa-benzo-coronene ⁺) in molecular clouds – large clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space.

Most of my time doing research during my MSc was spent on my Master's thesis, though. I developed an automated pipeline for analyzing spectra of stars, using machine learning techniques. This turned out to be a very successful endeavor, and I am currently working on integrating the next generation of this pipeline in the SDSS-V data reduction pipeline. Currently I am doing research on the chemistry of fullerenes in photo-dissociation regions (PDRs), using data from the James Webb Space Telescope.