Overview

Thanks to the continued support of the NSF, we will organize our signature summer school in 2025 and 2026. As in previous years, we continue with the same successful hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual attendance possible. We expect to accept up to 20 in-person and 40 online participants. In 2025, the school will take place on Jul 21-25 and will be hosted by the University of Minnesota, USA.

This year's theme for the ZTF summer school is "Astronomy Data Science in the Rubin Era" (see Program below for details).

Application & Funding

Funding

Unfortunately, we have limited funding to cover participant's expenses such as travel and lodging for the summer school. We will provide drinks and snacks and organize multiple social outings.

International applicant who would like to attend in-person and are applying from abroad are advised to consider online participation instead as we cannot provide any support in visa preparation and application.

Application

The application deadline is June 1st (00:00 UTC).

To apply for the school, you will need to fill a registration form and submit it along with:

• A one page motivation letter outlining (1) your motivation to join the school, (2) your background and experience with astronomy research, and (3) how the school will benefit your future research work.
• Those who want to join in-person should request a recommendation letter from an adviser or otherwise someone who can speak to your experience and potential. You should provide the email address of your referee in the application form and we will contact them with instructions on how to submit their recommendation letters.

Note that in order to upload files into the registration form, you will be asked to sign into your Google account.

Participants of any of the former ZTF summer schools are eligible and welcome to apply again.

Selected applicants will be invited in mid June.

 

Program

Modern optical surveys, in combination with data science principles, are transforming astrophysics with detections of very rare phenomena. Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will soon see first light, and it is expected that the combination of its depth and entendue will revolutionize the field. To maximize our sensitivity to fast transients, other wide field systems, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), will be following the footprint of LSST to probe otherwise inaccessible timescales down to a few hours, enabling us to study previously unobserved physics of well-known transients, e.g., supernovae (SNe), while also discovering rare, fast evolving sources, e.g., kilonovae. However, this brings to us the challenge of using multiple surveys to identify the nature of transients in alert streams, as detection does not mean identification, and identification does not mean understanding. In this summer school, we will focus on data science techniques for classification and characterization necessary for maximizing science with ZTF in this era of the LSST.

The school format includes short lectures and interactive hands-on sessions when students will work with Python Jupyter notebooks to complete data processing assignments under the guidance of tutors. The school will run approximately between 9 am and 4 pm CDT (UTC-5) each day. During that time, students who participate online will be able to submit questions to tutors via Slack. Students whose time zones make it inconvenient to join the school can work on their own. They are welcome to submit questions on Slack and our tutors will respond as soon as possible.

Accommodation

We recommend that you stay at Days Hotel . The hotel is within walking distance from the campus of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where the summer school sessions will take place.

Organizer

The lead organizer of the ZTF summer schools is Michael Coughlin at the University of Minnesota. He is assisted by members of the ZTF partnership.

• Matthew Graham - ZTF Project Scientist (Caltech)
• Ivona Kostadinova - ZTF Program Coordinator (Caltech)
• Local Organizing Committee

Contact

If you have questions, please get in touch with us at ztf dot summer dot school @ gmail.com