Wathela Alhassan

Wathela Alhassan is a Ph.D. candidate at the Particle Astrophysics Science and Technology Center (AstroCeNT), a unit of Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) in Warsaw, and a scholarship at Geoplanet Doctoral School.

His doctoral work is supervised by prof. Tomasz Bulik.

His current research focuses on application of artificial intelligence in astrophysics. He works in the Seismic Sensors group at AstroCeNT.

He worked as a researcher at the Department of Astronomy and Space Science, Institute of Space Research and Aerospace (ISRA) in Sudan, where he was managing two research projects devoted to:

1. to improve the performance of the FIRST classifier;
2. ISRA - on-site selection for finding the best location to establish an optical astronomical observatory using satellite imageries and Geographic Information System (GIS) based on multiple criteria.

Wathela was on the Machine Learning Engineers team building a Machine Learning Model to quantify the influence of climate anomalies on forced displacement of individuals and communities in Somalia through satellite imagery analysis. He was also a teaching assistant at the University of Cape Town.

Research interests

• astrophysics,
• machine learning,
• Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing,
• data science.

Degrees and titles

• 2019: MSc in Astrophysics and Space Science from Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and De Astronomy, University of Cape Town (South Africa),
• 2016: BSc (Honours) in Astrophysics and Space Science from Department of Astronomy, University of Cape Town, Cape Town (South Africa),
• 2015: MSc in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) Council of Bioscience, Advanced technology and Environment, Sudan Academy of Science, Khartoum (Sudan),
• 2012: BSc in Astronomy & Meteorology Department of Astronomy and Meteorology, Omdurman University, Omdurman (Sudan).