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Vacation Studentships in Astronomy at CAS

The Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing (CAS) accepts applications for Vacation Studentships from enthusiastic university students with excellent scholastic records who are in the last, or second last, year of their undergraduate or Honours/Masters degree.

With 29 research faculty, 21 postdoctoral researchers, and nearly 50 PhD students, CAS is a vibrant, friendly environment for studying most fields of astronomy. Swinburne astronomers have guaranteed access to the twin Keck 10-m Telescopes in Hawaii - the world's premier optical observatory - and CAS owns and operates one of Australia's most powerful supercomputers - Ozstar. We also develop advanced, immersive 3D data visualization facilities and create 3-D animations and movies promoting and explaining astronomy to the broader community.

Swinburne's Hawthorn campus is situated in a lively, urban setting just minutes by public transport from Melbourne's city centre.

Our Vacation Studentship programme aims to provide undergraduate students with some insight into how exciting research is and how it is conducted. Students will join a research project, or possibly help start a new one, in one of the many areas of astronomy in which CAS staff and post-docs are experts. The various projects on offer are listed below. Projects can involve all aspects of astronomical research, from proposing or carrying out new telescope observations, to analysing data, to conducting theoretical calculations or advanced simulations. Many previous students have eventually published peer-reviewed research articles on some of their Vacation Studentship research.

In 2025 this programme is expected to run in-person, with remote options possible, and will be available to students currently enrolled at universities in Australia and New Zealand. Projects are expected to run over 8 weeks, between November and February, with the timing to be negotiated between the student and their nominated supervisor. Vacation students are paid a tax-free stipend of $750 per week. An additional $250 is available for students based in New Zealand to offset the increased cost of relocation.

Applications are now being accepted and should be received before 29th August 2025; they should include the following:

  • A cover letter (see below for further information);
  • A copy of your official academic record, including an explanation of the grading system used;
  • Your Curriculum Vitae;
  • Proof of enrolment at an Australian or New Zealand university;
  • Any supporting documentation of previous research;
  • Applicants should also ask a lecturer or supervisor at their current university to send a letter of recommendation by the due date. This should be sent by the lecturer/supervisor directly; applicants should not include reference letters in their own application.

Applications and reference letters should be emailed to Dr. Simon Stevenson (spstevenson@swin.edu.au) with the above information attached (preferably as PDF documents).

The cover letter is important and should:
(i) set out why you are interested in undertaking a vacation studentship at Swinburne and
(ii) list at least two research projects you are interested in working on (with an optional ranking). See below for the current list of projects on offer.



Potential Vacation Studentship Research Projects

The following list outlines particular projects currently on offer. Other projects not listed here may also arise. If you have questions, contact Dr. Simon Stevenson at the above email.

(Last Updated 1st August 2025)



  • Radio jets or glowing accretion disks? Understanding how feeding black holes drive galactic outflows.

    Galactic outflows are powerful ejections of gas from galaxies triggered by feeding supermassive black holes. Outflows deprive galaxies of fuel to form new stars, and this large-scale gas removal may be key to understanding why some of the biggest galaxies stop forming stars so early in the Universe’s history. However, the processes responsible for launching outflows remain somewhat of a mystery. In this project, you will use observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and a variety of radio telescopes including the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and MeerKAT to investigate whether outflows are powered by radio jets or radiation from glowing gas in black hole accretion disks. This project is part of a larger ongoing research program led by Dr. Rebecca Davies and the student will be embedded within their research group which includes 4 PhD students.

    Supervisor: Dr. Rebecca Davies

  • Understanding how disc galaxies form bars

    Galaxies in our Universe can be broadly classified, based on their physical appearance, into ellipticals and disks. Unlike their elliptical counterparts, about two thirds of disc galaxies (including our own Milky Way) display a peculiar morphological feature – a galactic bar. Understanding the formation of galactic bars requires a detailed analysis of how stars rotate in the bar region. Recent advancements in analysis techniques which incorporate bar-like rotation have shown promise in significantly improving our models of galactic bars. Such methodologies have, however, only been successfully applied to a couple of nearby galaxies, to date. A robust understanding of galactic bar formation can only be obtained from studying a statistically significant sample of barred galaxies of various sizes and masses. In this project we will test recent methods for dynamically modelling galactic bars (using the Schwarzchild orbit superposition method) on a barred galaxy from the largest kinematic survey of nearby-Universe galaxies - MaNGA. If proven successful, this method could be applied to a larger sample of barred galaxies from MaNGA, thus greatly expanding our understanding of galactic bar formation

    Further Reading:

    Supervisor: Dr. Andrei Ristea

  • Finding new radio pulsars in an extragalactic globular cluster using the MeerKAT telescope

    Pulsars are “dead” collapsed stars that are amongst the most extreme objects of the Universe - they are the fastest spinning stars (usually, they undergo one complete revolution in less than a few seconds); they are the smallest and densest stars, with approximately the mass of our Sun contained in a radius of a few tens of kilometres; and they have the strongest stellar magnetic fields. Their lighthouse-like radio beams are observed as faint radio pulses from the Earth. While well over 3000 pulsars have been found in the Milky Way, our own galaxy, only about 40 extragalactic pulsars have been found owing to how distant they are. In this project, you will use a dataset from the state-of-the-art South African radio telescope MeerKAT to search for some of the fastest-spinning and relativistic pulsars outside of our galaxy.

    Further Reading:

    Supervisor: Dr. Emma Carli

  • The First Days of a Supernova with Rubin

    Exploding stars—supernovae—can result from the collapse of massive stars or from a white dwarf in a binary system accumulating too much material from its companion. These spectacular events enrich the Universe with heavy elements, shine across vast cosmic distances, and can remain visible for weeks to months. However, in the very first days after the explosion, it can be particularly challenging to determine their origins and classify them into types. With the first Rubin Observatory supernovae, this project will focus on those critical early moments. Using multi-wavelength light curves, you will explore how the brightness of supernovae evolves shortly after explosion. You'll identify patterns among similar-looking events, study the types of galaxies that host them, and examine how their environments may shape their evolution. This early-time window offers a powerful opportunity to improve our understanding of the physical mechanisms behind different supernova types.

    Supervisor: Dr. Annais Möller

  • Examining the Circumgalactic Medium Around Galaxies

    The circumgalactic medium (CGM) is the gaseous halo surrounding galaxies, playing a crucial role in galaxy evolution by regulating gas accretion and outflows. Despite its importance, the CGM remains poorly understood due to its diffuse nature and low density, making it challenging to detect and study. This project will involve analysing data from the Keck Telescope and other observatories to explore the physical properties of the CGM. You will use spectral line diagnostics to investigate the interactions between galaxies and their surrounding halos, focusing on how gas inflows and outflows impact galaxy growth and star formation. This work will help build a more complete understanding of how galaxies evolve over cosmic time. You will develop skills in Python programming, data reduction, and visualisation while learning to work with astronomical datasets. The project may also involve comparing observations with theoretical models of the CGM, helping you gain a strong foundation in both observational and theoretical astrophysics.

    Further Reading:

    Supervisor: Associate Professor Glenn Kacprzak

  • Axion Dark Matter Detection – Data Acquisition and Analysis

    The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in modern science – it makes up five sixths of the matter in the Universe, and is of unknown composition. It surrounds and passes through the Earth at all times. Axions are a hypothetical particle, and one of the leading candidates for dark matter. Swinburne is building a new axion detector to try and measure small effects induced by dark matter when it passes through the laboratory. The kind of experiment we are building is called an axion haloscope. The hope is that if the dark matter is made of axions, the detector can shed some light on its properties. The detector is being physically constructed and will be hosted at Swinburne – but work needs to be done on the software and analysis side. This project will focus on a data acquisition and analysis pipeline for the new axion dark matter detector. You will be working on code to interface with laboratory equipment, acquire new experimental data, and then tease through that data looking for hints of new physics.

    Supervisor: Dr. Ben McAllister

  • The Fourth LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Gravitational Wave Catalog - Implications for origins and formation

    Colliding neutron stars and black holes emit gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time. To date more than 300 collisions of compact objects, neutron stars and black holes, have now been observed in gravitational waves by LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, as detailed in the recent release (August 2025) of the Fourth LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC). This catalog more than doubles the size of the known population, and includes some unprecedented events, such as the massive binary black hole merger GW231123. In this project, you will develop models to understand the origin of the observed gravitational wave events via binary stellar evolution and stellar dynamics in environments such as star clusters and active galactic nuclei discs.

    Further Reading:

    Supervisor: Dr Simon Stevenson

  • Detecting the first gravitational-wave signal from the explosion of massive stars

    Hundreds of gravitational-wave signals have now been discovered from the merger of binary neutron stars and black holes, but other sources of gravitational waves have not yet been discovered. Some of the most violent explosive events in the Universe are predicted to emit bursts of gravitational waves, and may result in the next big multi-messenger discovery. One of the most promising astrophysical sources of gravitational waves is a core-collapse supernova. In this project, you will help to develop a new search for gravitational waves from core-collapse supernovae, and apply this new search to real data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational-wave observatories.

    Further Reading:

    Supervisor: Dr. Jade Powell

  • Catching elusive supernova UV bursts and shock-breakouts

    Supernovae are the deaths of massive stars or white dwarf stars in interacting/merging binary systems. The types of stars that cause each supernova type has been theorised, but has remained largely unclear observationally. Understanding which type of star that cause each supernova type helps understand their explosion mechanisms, their binary star system formation and dynamics, mass accretion or mass stripping, element formation, and their overall nature, particularly as some are used for cosmological tools. Detecting elusive and fast-evolving (minutes-to-day durations) UV bursts and shock-breakouts can help solve this problem. This project will use the unique Deeper, Wider, Faster (DWF) program dataset that coordinates the world’s most powerful wide-field telescopes operating at all wavelengths (radio through gamma-ray) taking fast (seconds to minutes) cadenced observations to detect fast-evolving transients. These data provide the necessary deep and densely-sampled wide-field images with a cadence faster than any other survey, to detect these events. In this project, we will use the DWF data to identify and study the many supernovae discovered by the program and search for those caught on the first day of outburst to search for fast UV burst and supernova shock-breakout signatures.

    Supervisor: Prof. Jeff Cooke

  • Hearing is believing - and powerful for research

    Data sonification is the process of converting data into sound. Data sonification has been used for a wide variety of purposes and mostly for niche applications over the years. However, the field has been growing very quickly over the last decade and the use of data sonification to enhance and improve scientific research is still relatively new. Our group has developed tools to exploit the power of human hearing to advance astronomy research in much needed areas, such as detecting low signal-to-noise ratio data, detecting transient sources quickly, and enabling multi-parameter space research (e.g., studying 10 or more properties of a source in a single tone). In this project, we will explore advancing our sonification tools in these areas, with the aim to quantify the impact data sonification has over visual or other data analysis methods and its use in verifying tentative results obtained via other methods. In addition, the project tools and applications will help individuals that are blind or have vision impairment contribute significantly to scientific research and to help with their everyday quality of life.

    Supervisor: Prof. Jeff Cooke