Welcome!

My name is Simone Scaringi and here is a picture of me at VAM 2023 and another of my shadow taken at Paranal observatory. I'm passionate about understanding: nothing beats a good hypothesis to test, no matter who brings it to the table!

I am an Associate Professor in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy at Durham University. I have previously held faculty postitions at Texas Tech University and at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. I held a Humboldt Fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a FWO Pegasus Marie Curie Fellow in the Institute of Astronomy at KU Leuven, and before that I was a postdoctoral resarcher in the Department of Astrophysics at Radboud University Nijmegen. I completed my BSc in Maths with Astronomy, and obtained my MPhil and my PhD in the Astronomy Group at the University of Southampton.

My research mostly revolves around understanding the processes of mass transfer and accretion within binary systems, its effects and consequences to the binaries, and their evolution. I am particulary fond of accreting white dwarfs (and more specifically so-called Cataclysmic Variables), but all accretion processes intrigue me, no matter the accretor! I have extensivley used data from space-based optical timing missions such as Kepler and TESS to study accretion-driven variability, as well as discover new transient variability phenomena in these systems. I like to test the notion that accretion physics is scale-invariant, and to do this I compare phenomenological results and physical models between accreting white dwarfs, young stars, neutron stars and black holes (both stellar-mass and supermassive).

I am also interested in machine learning applied to astronomical datasets (a passion started during my Master and PhD), and am currently focused on Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks and more recently Transformers.

I am thus mostly an observational astronomer, but like to attempt some theoretical modelling too. If you are interested to know more about me and my research, please use the tabs on the top of this page.