ZTF Faces

Theophile du Laz

Computer Scientist Staff, Caltech USA

Where was your starting point and how did you discover astronomy?

I come from Paris, in France. I grew up and mostly studied there before I started traveling to different corners of the world.

I went to an engineering school back home (equivalent to a master’s degree). There, I majored in Data Science and AI. Actually, I was still in my last semester when I started working for ZTF back in Feb 2023, and graduated 6 months later.

How did you discover ZTF?

In my fourth year of engineering school I got to work with a gravitational wave follow-up collaboration called GRANDMA, based in France. They needed me and other students to contribute to the development of SkyPortal, an open-source astronomical big data platform, which also happened to be the platform used by ZTF! After working with them for a few months, I spent 4 months at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) for an internship, then continued part-time while studying abroad in South Korea until some US-based collaborators - and ZTF partners - reached out with a job offer, which I accepted right away.

What are you playing with in the ZTF playground?

I am a computational scientist. I develop, maintain, and deploy a variety of software solutions that ZTF and its partners rely on for daily operations. These range from processing the hundreds of thousands of "alerts" sent every night when the telescope takes new images, to coordinating the follow-up resources we pour into interesting astronomical objects, and all the steps in between. It is very much of a big data problem. I also had the chance to contribute to a wide variety of projects to enable an even wider variety of science cases. A good example is BTSbot (w/ Nabeel Rehemtulla from Northwestern): an AI-enabled automated supernova discovery system, which already classified hundreds of SNe since we started running it last year.

Where do you want to steer your rocket in the future?

I am still figuring it out! There are always many things for me to do, but in 2025 a lot of my time will be focused on building even more efficient and complex tools to enable the ZTF + Vera C. Rubin operations, as the number of things we can look at to find rare transients will be an order of magnitude larger. This is an amazing opportunity to learn new things and develop new cutting-edge software. I also want to introduce more and more automation in these systems, and I'm hoping to create opportunities to add hardware + software projects in the mix.

If you were not an astronomer, what would you be?

Well... I'm not an "astronomer" per say, but I can try to imagine what I would do if I was not working in astronomy. Space is and will always be in the equation. I have been fascinated by space exploration since I was a kid, so that is my best guess: building the tools we need to get robots, and why not people to other bodies of the solar system and beyond. That said, I could give you a ton of different answers. I am interested in a lot of things, but above all, I like to solve problems. The exact type of problem matters less, as long as there is something new to learn.

A book that shook your worldview?

One book that left me with more questions than answers - which in my opinion is precisely what a good book should do - is The Stranger by Albert Camus. It's a novel that portrays the constant duality between the very human need to find meaning in a world that often seems to not have any, especially in this post-WWI period when it was written. The main character is insensible and distant to everything around him, a stranger in his own life. It's a beautiful book that makes you think about what meaning you should give to your own life.

If you’ve had a bad day at work, you will…

I'll likely treat myself to a nice take-out and watch a movie at home. Or, I might go out to have a drink. Pasadena has a surprising number of very nice places to have great drinks and comforting food!