Paul J. Wright

Bio

In January 2021, I decided to leave academia and the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue new opportunities. I am a currently a Senior ML Scientist in a small startup.

Prior to 2021, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at Stanford University and a Core Mentor at the NASA Frontier Development Lab. My academic research interests were (and still are) in the application of machine learning in space science. Feel free to check out my current projects.

Before arriving at Stanford, I completed my PhD at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Dr Iain G. Hannah. My PhD research concentrated on one of the unsolved problems in Heliophysics—the coronal heating problem. During my PhD, I gained expertise in numerous time-series analysis techniques and methods for recovering the differential emission measure (an ill-posed inverse problem) from a wide range of spectroscopic and narrowband data. I am a member of the NuSTAR heliophysics working group, and I led the analysis of the first solar flare observed by the NuSTAR hard X-ray astrophysics imaging spectrometer.

Google Cloud recently developed a website and produced videos on our work at the Frontier Development Lab (FDL). Click the image below to navigate to the Google microsite!

News

01/2021
In January 2021, I left Stanford to pursue new opportunities
11/2020
Started my own consultancy: Wright AI Ltd
09/2020
aiapy is now citeable! available at Zenodo
08/2020
Attended the Helio Hackweek 2020; worked on aiapy
07/2020
Google Cloud released two videos of NASA FDL 2019 work! available here and here
07/2020
Attended SciPy 2020
05/2020
Accepted to participate in Helio Hackweek 2020 (August 20th - 27th)
04/2020
Attended the PyAstro 2020 Hack Day and worked on sunkit-dem: see github repo!
01/2020
Joined Orion (AI) Labs
12/2019
Attended NeurIPS 2019
12/2019
Presented at AGU Fall Meeting 2019
11/2019
FDL Results Featured by NASA: available here
11/2019
Two Deep Learning Papers Accepted to Workshops at NeurIPS 2019 (Vancouver, Canada)
10/2019
Intel AI blog post of our FDL 2019 challenge: available here
10/2019
New Deep Learning Paper Published by Science Advances: see the press coverage here
09/2019
Presented at the 1st Machine Learning in Heliophysics (ML-Helio) Conference
08/2019
Super-resolution Magnetogram team win the Collaborative Spirit award at NASA FDL
06/2019
FDL 2019 kicked off: An 8-week applied AI accelerator hosted at SETI in Mountain View, CA
04/2019
Machine Learning dataset prepared from the SDO Mission available here
04/2019
Awarded PhD; Thesis title: Energetics of small solar flares and brightenings

Publications

Complete list of publications on NASA ADS.

Résumé

• SpaceML Jan 21' - present

  Steering Team Member
  
• Small Startup Jan 21' - present

  Senior ML Scientist
  
• Wright AI Ltd May '19 - June '21

  Applied ML Consultant
  
• NASA Frontier Development Lab May '19 - June '21

  Core Mentor / Team Lead
  Super-resolution Magnetograms
• Stanford University May '19 - Jan '21

  Postdoctoral Research Fellow (HMI)
  W. W. Hansen Experimental Physics Lab.
• University of Glasgow Oct '14 - Apr '19

  PhD Student
  Physics & Astrophysics
• NASA Frontier Development Lab Jun - Aug '18

  Machine Learning Researcher (Intern)
  Space Weather Team
• NASA GSFC Apr - May '16

  Visiting Researcher
  Goddard Space Flight Center
• SAO/Harvard University Aug '13 - Jun '14

  Research Scholar
  Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
  Dudley House, Harvard University
• University of Southampton Oct '10 - Jul '14

  MPhys Student
  Physics & Astrophysics with a Year Abroad
  First Class Honours (US GPA: 3.92/4.0)