It was my pleasure to be a part of the PhD committee for Sebastian Ratzenböck (Vienna), who wrote a dissertation in computer science but as applied to astrophysics. He had three advisors, in statistics, in computer science, and in astronomy, and he beautifully bridged the three worlds. His research was on finding members of stellar clusters, and on finding new stellar clusters. He showed (pretty convincingly, I think) that star-forming regions break up into many individual star-forming events with different ages and different kinematics. One of his conclusions is that all star formation happens in clusters or groups! He also made a nice technical advance, which was to build a tool to select clustering hyper-parameters in the space of physical quantities one cares about, instead of in the space of arbitrarily-defined clustering-method parameters. It was a great thesis, a beautiful defense, and a fun time drinking afterwards. Congratulations Dr Ratzenböck!
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