I am a fifth year Ph.D. student at Columbia University in the Department of Astronomy. During my Ph.D., I was a LSSTC Data Science Fellow and National Osterbrock Leadership Fellow, and received the Canadian Graduate Research Scholarship from NSERC. I received my bachelor’s from the University of British Columbia in Physics & Astronomy, after which I worked as a Data Analytics Consultant at Ernst & Young.

Research Interests

My research interests are in stellar astrophysics. Broadly, I’m interested in understanding the formation mechanisms of unsusual stellar populations. Similar to “Nature vs. Nurture” in Biology, I want to understand if chemically peculiar stars are a result of changes in a star’s environment, or rapid proceses in stellar evolution. During my Ph.D., I focused on two populations of weird stars: lithium-rich red giants and solar-like stars without oscillations in Kepler. Read more about my research, or refer to my list of publications for recent papers. I’m the lead developer of The Swan, a data-driven technique to predict stellar surface gravities, and contributor of pySYD, an open-source Python package to measure global asteroseismic parameters.

Contact Me

Email: maryum.sayeed@columbia.edu
Office: Pupin Hall, 538 West 120th Street, New York, NY