Viraj Karambelkar
NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia University
Los Angeles Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolViraj Karambelkar is a NASA Hubble Fellow and PhD astrophysicist with nine years of experience building scalable data pipelines and statistical/ML systems to mine astronomical big data for rare phenomena. At Caltech he engineered a realtime Python pipeline that processes 100 GB of images per night and sifted millions of candidate sources to discover a handful of extremely rare cosmic explosions each year, and his work contributed to over fifty publications including three Nature papers. He combines deep domain expertise in time-series analysis and classification with production-grade engineering—having written observatory automation software in Python and C++ for a robotic telescope and classified variability across tens of millions of stars. Based in Los Angeles, he is motivated to translate these data-science skills to real-world problems that impact people, bringing both a researcher’s rigor and a practitioner’s focus on reliable, automated systems. An unexpected strength is his track record of optimizing pipelines for extreme class imbalance, turning vanishingly rare signals into robust, actionable discoveries.
9 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Indian Institute of Technology BombayCalifornia Institute of Technology
Github Skills (18)
reduction10
template-matching10
astronomy10
image-processing10
imaging10
modular9
python9
machine-learning8
open-source8
survey8
broker7
python-client6
trigger5
transient4
react4
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
virajkaram/winterdrp_offline
Jul 2023 - Mar 2025
Contributions:6 PRs, 14 pushes, 2 branches in 1 year 7 months
virajkaram/virajkaram.github.io
Mar 2023 - Jan 2025
Contributions:7 PRs, 19 pushes, 12 branches in 1 year 10 months
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