Accelerating discovery in the petascale astronomy era

Dr Vohl’s thesis addressed fundamental problems facing Astronomy in the “Big Data” era relating to processing, visualisation, analysis, storage, and transfer of data. Many planned or ongoing projects aim at increasing the number of objects studied by several orders of magnitude. As both the volume and velocity at which data is generated increase, novel methods and analytical tools are required to help understand information hidden within data. Dr Vohl’s research investigated and introduced novel visualisation methods for real-time collaborative visual analytics in immersive environments; and explored data compression to accelerate data transfer within geographically dispersed, time-critical observing programs.