David Hendriks

PhD Student Astrophysics

University of Surrey

Biography

My name is David Hendriks, and I’m a final year PhD student at the university of Surrey. My PhD is on binary star interactions and how accretion disks outflows affect their orbital evolution, as well as which of these binary star systems evolve in to binary black hole systems that merge through gravitational wave emission. I make use of ballistic orbit integration codes to study the behaviour of particles in a gravitational potential, binary population synthesis to evolve large populations of binary stars (using the package that I wrote called binary_c-python), as well as detailed accretion disk evolution codes to study the behaviour of accretion disks in detail.

Interests

Stellar evolution
Compact object formation
Planetary formation
Bayesian sampling methods
Notetaking and organising thoughts
Physics informed neural networks

Education

PhD Astrophysics, 2018 - Now

University of Surrey
Msc Astronomy (GRAPPA), 2015 - 2018

University of Amsterdam
Bsc Physics and astronomy, 2011 - 2015

University of Amsterdam

Recent Posts

binary_c-python

For my research during my masters and PhD I’ve made us of the rapid (binary) stellar evolution code binary_c, to simulate (binary) star systems. The population-synthesis wrapper that enabled running many of these systems was written in Perl but I decided to rewrite this into a Python based code. The code is well documented and automatically generated based on docstrings, and is available on Gitlab and Pypi. We provide tutorial and example notebooks on how to use the code technically, and how to actually calculate useful things with it on documentation page.

Jun 19, 2023

My workflow and setup

Table of Contents ZSH + oh-my-ZSH FZF TODO TMUX + addons pyenv & pyenv-virtualenv Git pre-commit hooks Emacs + Org In my day to day life as an Astrophysics PhD student I make heavy use of linux systems and spend many hours within terminal environments and running things on servers. Over the years I’ve created a nice workflow and setup to make things a bit easier, and below is a bit of a write up of this.

Nov 20, 2022

Acceleration Hamiltonian Monte Carlo through neural symplectic transformations and action angle sampling

During the last phase of my PhD I worked together with Dr. Payel Das, Dr. Simon Hadfield and Dr. Yunpeng Li, on a project aimed at accelerating Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo. This project was quite a cross-disciplinary effort, as we had to combine ideas from (astro)physics together with computer science and probabilistic mathematics. Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo is a Monte-Carlo sampling/inference technique which uses techniques from classical mechanics to guide the sampling through the posterior.

Oct 11, 2022

Websites

Table of Contents TODO physics-fair.nl davidhendriks.com TODO dekunztvanwillem.nl Astrotalks nsaweb.nl TODO API-alumni.nl TODO SupaHarris.com During my studies at the UvA I learned some Django to build some websites with Python, and I noticed I quite liked building websites. Over the past year I have created some websites, and below is a list of them. ## TODO physics-fair.nl I created the website for outreach organisation Physics-Fair to provide contact information, information about the physics-fair events that we organise and request forms.

Sep 25, 2022

Notetaking

During my PhD I developed a more well thought-out workflow for making notes and writing in general. My Master’s supervisor used Emacs a lot so I thought why not give that a try. The extension org-mode made writing notes a lot more pleasant, and provides a wealth of functionality for organising and planning. Big thank you to Carsten Dominik for writing that package, wish I knew about it when I followed his courses at the UvA!

Sep 18, 2022

Notetaking