Welcome
Hello and welcome to my website!
My name is Ali Ahmad Khostovan. I am an observational extragalactic astrophysicist (fancy talk for I study galaxies using telescopes :D). I am currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Rochester Institute of Technology under the supervision of Jeyhan Kartaltepe. I am originally from South San Francisco, CA and moved south to pursue my undergraduate studies with Asantha Cooray at UC Irvine where I worked as part of his group for all four years. I received my Bachelors of Science in Physics (specialized in Astrophysics) in 2012 and went 1 hour northeast to UC Riverside where I pursued my PhD studies. My thesis advisers were Bahram Mobasher (UCR) and David Sobral (Univ. of Lisbon; later Lancaster Univ) where I worked on studying galaxies selected via their strong emission line features using narrowband surveys. My PhD work was funded by a Chancellor’s Distinction Fellowship and NASA Earth & Space Sciences Fellowship. I received my PhD in 2018 and moved to Maryland where I continued my work in studying emission line galaxies as a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center under the supervision of Sangeeta Malhotra and James Rhoads. As of 2021, I have been working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Jeyhan Kartaltepe’s group at RIT on several interesting projects related to archival spectroscopic datasets to JWST studies of Extreme Emission Line Galaxies to citizen science programs.
I am currently applying for faculty, research staff, and postdoctoral positions and hope this website would be a great reference for anyone to learn more about what I do. Feel free to look around and reach out if you have any questions. I am also always open to collaborating with scientists and public outreach representatives and would love to hear from you.
You can also refer to my CV (includes list of publications):
See Research for more