Roman Akhmetshyn

Roman Akhmetshyn completed his Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Astronomy at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. During his undergraduate studies in 2022, he moved to Canada for a summer internship, and later a research assistant position, at Western University, where he worked on Kuiper Belt object detection using stellar occultation with the Colibri telescope array. His undergraduate thesis is based on this research. In 2023 Roman participated in another summer internship as part of Univerity of Waterloo’s initiative for students at risk from Ukraine. He researched dark matter density distribution using weak lensing data from UNIONS.

Roman is now continuing his journey in astrophysics research under the supervision of Nicolas Cowan. First as a Research Trainee and now as a Master’s student, he works with planetary-mass brown dwarfs, studying their atmospheric variability with NIRISS spectra and trying to map the meteorological features of these peculiar objects.

Roman is also part of the organizing committee of the international annual Young Scientists’ Conference on Astronomy and Space Physics organized by the Department of Astronomy and Space Physics of his alma mater.

Supervisor

Nicolas Cowan