About Me

Hello World. My name is Chalence Safranek-Shrader. I am currently a fellow at Insight Data Science where I am pleased to be making the transition from academia to industry. I am keen to apply my data analysis, statistics, and machine learning background to tackle interesting, business-oriented challenges.

I hail from sunny Los Angeles, California, received my B.S. in astrophysics from UCLA in 2007, and was awarded my Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 where I was jointly advised by Volker Bromm and Milos Milosavljevic. I then spent some time as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley where I worked with Mark Krumholz, Christopher McKee, and Richard Klein.

Research wise, I was primarily interested in understanding how stars form across cosmic time - both at high redshifts and at the present day. I tackled this by means of large-scale radiation-magneto-hydrodynamic simulations which followed the progression of star formation from large (Mpc/Kpc) scales down to those of protostellar disks (tens of AU).

When not looking at a computer screen, I enjoy cooking, rock climbing, jazz piano, volleyball, food infomercials, Skymall, and tennis.