Professor Savransky received his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, where he was a member of the High Contrast Imaging Laboratory. After completing his doctorate in 2011, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he assisted in the integration and testing of the Gemini Planet Imager and participated in the planning of the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey.
Professor Savransky's research is comprised of a variety of problems related to the detection and characterization of extrasolar planets. These include investigations of advanced control and estimation for active wavefront control systems; computer vision and machine learning applications for automated optical system alignment and astronomical image post-processing; optimal scheduling for autonomous space observatories and ground-based surveys; and statistical analysis of large astronomical surveys.
Dynamics and control systems, celestial mechanics, computational and numerical methods.
Savransky, D., Garrett, D. (2015) WFIRST-AFTA coronagraph science yield modeling with EXOSIMS. Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, 2(1):011,006. doi:10.1117/1.JATIS.2.1.011006
Fang, J., Savransky, D. (2016) Automated alignment of a reconfigurable optical system using focal-plane sensing and Kalman filtering. Applied Optics, 55(22):5967–5976. doi:10.1364/AO.55.005967
Garrett, D., Savransky, D. (2016) Analytical formulation of the single-visit completeness joint probability density function. The Astrophysical Journal, 828(1):20. doi:10.3847/0004-637X/828/1/20
Fang, J., Savransky, D. (2018) Wavefront reconstruction with defocus and transverse shift estimation using Kalman filtering. Optics and Lasers in Engineering, 111:122 – 129. doi:10.1016/j.optlaseng.2018.07.006
Gascón, C., Savransky, D., Sureda, M. (2020) Analytic stability maps of unknown exoplanet companions for imaging prioritization. The Astronomical Journal, 160(2):84. doi:10.3847/1538-3881/ab9b21
Soto, G. J., Savransky, D., Morgan, R. (2021) Analytical model for starshade formation flying with applications to exoplanet direct imaging observation scheduling. Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, 7(2):1 – 32. doi:10.1117/1.JATIS.7.2.021209
