Welcome

André

My name is André Offringa. I'm an astronomer and head of the LOFAR Science Group at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) since 2014, and have a position of "Universitair Docent" (assistant professor) at the University of Groningen. I'm interested in the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR), which is a period in the evolution of our Universe in which the first objects started to heat our universe. I am part of the management team of the LOFAR EoR project, an exciting project that uses the LOFAR telescope to detect signals from the early Universe.

From 2012 to 2014, I worked as post-doctoral fellow at Mount Stromlo Observatory, a research school of the Australian National University in Canberra. There, I worked with the Murchison Widefield Array interferometric telescope to make a statistical detection of the Epoch of Reionisation.

I'm also involved in the analysis and mitigation of Radio-Frequency Interference (RFI): my PhD thesis at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute (2008-2012) was about this topic. Finally, I work on imaging & calibration algorithms. You can find articles I wrote on the publications page.

In my free time, I do horse riding, practice ballroom dancing and play a few instruments; mostly the piano. Up to 2022, I taught ballroom dancing at Student Society 'The Blue Toes'.

Software products & interests

One of the things I do for my work, is writing scientific software. One of the tools I wrote is the AOFlagger, a platform to mitigate radio-frequency interference from interferometric or single-dish observations. I also wrote two interferometric imagers: a fast imager called WSClean and an interferometric imager that does not require gridding of the data in uv-space. Both are aimed at doing widefield synthesis. I also designed a visibility compression technique named Dysco.

Most of the time, I use the C++ programming language for developing software.