Roland Vavrek (Ph.D.)

ESA: Herschel Science Centre


I joined ESA in 2004 from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in
Heidelberg and moved to ESAC in 2005. As a member of Herschel
Science Centre my current position involves working with one of the
science instruments, I am instrument and calibration scientist for
PACS.

My main scientific interest in the past decade has been the study
of the structure of diffuse interstellar material in the Galaxy and
the relation between the primordial gas distribution and star
formation activity in molecular clouds.

In the past years I developed a multi-scale image analysis method
based on wavelet decomposition (Wavelet Transform Modulus Maxima,
WTMM) of astronomical data. Image analysis in general is the
extraction of characteristic information from images. The proposed
technique allows the detection and parameterization of varieties of
structural features in complex images such as large scale maps of
interstellar molecular clouds. Currently, this application is used
as a hypothesis testing tool to find  optimized parameters for
magnetohydrodynamical simulations of star forming molecular clouds.
The aim to use multi-scale approach is a natural consequence of the
underlying physical process of interstellar cloud formation. In
these  clouds the turbulent gas dynamics produces hierarchical
structures in the density and velocity fields what can be best
characterized with multi-scale  measures. Further advantage of a
WTMM based method for complexity characterisation is its robustness
against stochastic variations in the data and its ability to
assimilate several images of different size and resolution.