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Photograph of Lee Rottler

Lee Rottler Physicist in Residence Physics

For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.

Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Research Interests

Current Projects:

  • Working on a team with Bruce McCollum, Fred Bruwheiler, and Seppo Laine to study known red transients and the possible connection with stellar mergers as in V1309 Sco. Am on several successful HST, ALMA, and NOT observing proposals as part of this study and am involved in some of the data reduction.

  • Continuing work on the development and implementation of Deep Learning techniques for astronomical feature extraction and knowledge inference with colleagues at Caltech, Brevard College, and PARI. Working with Celso Batalha on developing radio astronomy course modules for students using the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope as part of the Evergreen Community College STEM outreach program.

  • In addition am working on a project with Celso to involve high school students in directly in research leading to a publication or poster. The current research topic is to to reduce and analyze high resolution spectral data of accretion onto Ttauri stars from their circumstellar dust disks.

Previous Projects:

  • Wrote several successful observing proposals to use the CARMA mm radio interferometer to look for dust around V838. Collaborated with Arthur Young and Celso Batalha on a time series study of the anomalous H-alpha emission from V471 Tauri, a K-star white dwarf binary system. I was first author on the resulting publication. As part of this project we did a study, reported in a PASP paper, on how to remove errors introduced in the measured spectra due to various sources of systematic error in the telescope and spectrograph.

  • Participated in the plasma experiments conducted on the Doublet-III Tokamak and worked on several plasma diagnostic experiments and was in charge of the scanning visible spectrometer which I helped build, run, and wrote the data reduction software for under the direction of Neil Brooks.