Marcos Van Dam
Adaptive Optics Scientist at Flat Wavefronts
Canterbury, New Zealand
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMarcos Van Dam is an adaptive optics scientist with 13 years of hands-on experience designing, simulating and optimizing AO systems for major observatories and research institutes. Based in Canterbury, New Zealand, he consults through his company Flat Wavefronts and has deep expertise in wavefront sensing, reconstruction and control, phase retrieval, and image-quality metrics. His career includes instrumental contributions to GeMS at Gemini South and LGS-AO upgrades at Keck, where he developed faster guide-star acquisition and novel reconstructors. He pairs rigorous Monte-Carlo and analytical modeling with practical troubleshooting and performance optimization across segmented-telescope phasing and non-common-path aberration compensation. Trained as an electrical and electronic engineer with a PhD from the University of Canterbury, he also brings experience in 3D geological modeling and inverse problems that inform his cross-disciplinary approach. Colleagues value him for translating complex algorithms into robust operational tools used on large telescopes.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, BE (Hons), BSc, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, PhD, BE (Hons), BSc, Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University of CanterburyBSc, BSc at Victoria University of Wellington
English, Spanish, French, German
Github Skills (20)
simulation9
hdf8
plplot8
grib7
dicom6
geophysics6
netcdf6
antlr6
astronomy6
gnu5
scientific-visualization5
cuda5
journal5
python5
programming-language5
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
mvandam/mvandam
Aug 2021 - Jan 2024
Contributions:1 push, 1 branch in 2 years 5 months
frigaut/yao
Jun 2013 - Jul 2021
An adaptive optics simulation package. Yao is a yorick plugin. Many of the core routines are written in C, which makes it very fast.
Contributions:57 commits, 1 PR, 43 pushes in 8 years 1 month
simulation
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