Steven Dorsher

Former Computational Physicist

I have had a 15+ year research career in physics and astronomy over the course of my bachelors degree, three masters degrees, and since my final graduation. Most of this (10+ years) has been in computational physics. My primary focus is in general relativity, black holes, and gravitational waves. I have also done research in cosmology, particle physics, neutrinos, exoplanets, the three body Newtonian gravity problem, and fractional calculus.

I have 8 main publications/documents and about 35 total including membership in LIGO spanning the time of the first three detections.

My background is primarily in scientific programming, in the context of data analysis algorithms, experiment development and assessment, and numerical methods for theory.

Education

• MS Physics, LSU, December 2017. Multiple advisors and supervisors, at the time of graduation, Jorge Pullin
• MS Physics, U of MN, July 2013. Mulitple advisors and supervisors. For NOνA, Ronald Poling. At the time of graduation, Joseph Kapusta signed off as Department Chair.
• MS Astronomy, Ohio State, August 2006. Advisor: Andrew Gould
• BS Physics, MIT, June 2004. Advisor: Jacqueline Hewitt

Computational work

• C++ EMRI code I wrote for my masters at LSU Simulation of a scalar field model of an extreme mass ratio inspiral black hole binary on a Schwarszchild background in General Relativity
• FORTRAN EMRI Code my advisor provided for me to port to C++ LSUMy C++ black hole binary simulation was ported from this FORTRAN code supplied by my advisor
• Python error convergence analysis An analysis of my advisors original FORTRAN code and its truncation and roundoff error with discontinuous Galerkin order and multipole moment mode numbers
• Masters Exam Paper at LSUDocumentation for the research mentioned above, 70 pages of work toward a thesis submitted for a successful masters exam
• Go to "generalexammainfile.pdf" here for Masters Exam Paper from LSU since the Research Gate link seems to keep breaking and I don't seem to be able to update this on the Github Homepage

• Radon transform spectrogram gravitational wave search article This is an article on NASA's preprint arXiv about a gravitational wave search I wrote. My contribution is section V.B. and figure 4, especially. I personally no longer possess the code and am unsure whether or not it is in use, though similar code certainly is still used to make gravitational wave detections
• Gravity Gradient Noise simulation, LIGO I no longer have the code for this either, also written in MATLAB
• LIGO Event Trigger DatabaseI was a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration during the time of the first few detections and for several years before. Oh yeah also I wrote a terrible database in Java and HBase
• Documentation for that prototype database
• Short sample of fourier transforms in MatlabWritten in two weeks before I lost access more than a decade ago. Just wanted to prove I had been using it for two years after I lost access to my gravitational wave search code and the gravity gradient noise simulations I wrote there.
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• Exoplanets paper. I no longer have the code, written in FORTRAN at Ohio State for a masters in astronomy. Early exoplanet statistics analysis using Monte Carlo methods to simulate a line of sight in the galaxy to realistically determine the observable population of stars in the OGLE-III lensing survey, and hence the fraction of stars with planets.
• Undergrad ThesisWritten in C, I no longer have the code. This was a Monte Carlo simulation to assess the feasibility of using Einstein ring radii to measure the cosmological constant and matter density of the universe based on strong gravitational lens systems known at the time.
• Python Newtonian Gravity three body orbits codeThis numerically solves a differential equation to plot an orbit and compute the energy transfer between a planet and an inner binary star system. I have verified that it is not a numerical artifact of the simulation.

• Digital Fractional Order Differentiator and Integrator Simulation I developed and wrote this algorithm in C++
• First author paper on the fractional calculus algorithm, submitted eons ago but not published, honestly I don't know how and it wouldn't be possible anymore

• Tiny black hole image codeHere I created an image of the sky as seen around a black hole (think Gargantua from Interstellar, only way more disappointing due to image resolution) using a small amount of compute time on 4 processes for a class with mpi4py
• Black hole image final project writeup
• Converts between astronomical timesWritten a long time ago for a class. No promises

Tiny black hole image I made

Other Skills

Other previous experience with:

• Matlab (2.5 years)
• Java (1 year)

Technically have used:

• Bash
• Scheme
• Haskell

Databases

• Pandas
• A little SQL
• A little HBase

Very minimal parallel programming experience with

• OpenMP
• MPI
• mpi4py

Machine Learning-- beginner level, certificates, need practical experience still, mostly guided projects so far

• Data Cleaning
• Visualization
• Regression-- linear, relu, logistic, tanh, softmax
• Classification
• Clustering
• Neural Networks
• Convolutional Filtering
• Adam optimizer
• Batch filter
• Recurrent Neural Networks
• Maybe: Transformers
• Maybe: GRUs, LTSMs
• Guided Projects in: phrase generation, image recognition and object detection and location, music generation, activation word detection (and overlay of beep), facial recognition and authorization, video game starship lander trajectory prediction, French to English translation (though that was very heavily guided and my French is very beginner)
• Mathematical calculation of more precise technique for cosine similarity (it is possible a reference was given but I computed it instead)

Languages

--though my hearing is not amazing (though seriously, people with glasses can often see just fine, but my hearing is worse than average and I don't have hearing aids)

• ENGLISH--native speaker
• Danish--I've finished the Duolingo track though have little practical experience speaking it
• French--High school in 2000 though I have begun studying it on Duolingo again
• I am just beginning to study German, Turkish, and Spanish but these don't really count as skills at this time

RESUME, CV, GITHUB, PUBLICATIONS, AND TRANSCRIPTS

• Resume
• Rough draft of resume, focussed on skills, written about 2 am May 14 2025, so still a work in progress
• CV
• My GitHub Profile
• Publications on ORCID
• Publications on ResearchGate
• Publications on academia.edu
• Publications on InspireHEP
• Transcripts

Degrees verifiable online

• MIT Undergrad Thesis, which was the final step before the BS in physics (which I did recieved 2004)
• Ohio State MS degree in astronomy listed online
• UMN Diploma (image, pdf)
• LSU electronic credential for 2017 physics MS
• LSU Fall Graduates in Physics and Astronomy 2017

Certificates

Deep Learning Specialization; Coursera; DeepLearning.AI

Machine Learning Specialization; Coursera; DeepLearning.AI; Stanford

• Machine Learning Specialization Career Certificate
• Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification
• Advanced Learning Algorithms
• Unsupervised Learning, Recommenders, Reinforcement Learning<

Coursera; Google; discontinued due to inability to finance BigQuery

• Ask Questions to Make Data-Driven Decisions
• Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere
• A Crash Course in Data Science
• Prepare Data for Exploration

DataQuest Data Science Certificates

Job status/teaching certificates

• Advanced Tutor Credential
• Intermediate Tutor Credential
• Tutor Longevity Credential
• 250 Student Favorites Credential
• Top Influencer (note, I have deleted my X account)

Links

Other professional portfolio websites, and about-me's

• Portfolio website on Google Sites
• Portfolio website on Owlstown
• Profile on 500 Queer Scientists
• "The Org"
• I'm sure you care but I was on the 2000 US Physics Olympiad Team
• I'm sure you care but I was second place in MN in MathCounts in 1996

Personal links

• The Pheonix's Rebirth and the Dragon's Death, a saga I made on NightCafe
• Twin Paradox, another NightCafe image I made

Contact Information

You can reach me most easily by email:

On names and ID: My degrees were granted under the name of Susan Dorsher, which is my legal name (associated with the credit card on this account FYI and I have sent LinkedIn ID in the form of my passport card and MN state ID). The majority of my publications are under Steven Dorsher (please see ORCID or ResearchGate where both names are listed) to reflect the name I have used personally and professionally since 2009. I am a transman/nonbinary, permanently in the middle by both choice and medical necessity. Please, I go by Steven.

This is my real name and identity. I do not have alternate identities. My Guild Wars 2: WaveIn; SWTOR legacy: Dreamstar. FFXIV: will update when I remember. MIT & 90's: eirl; Legend's LARPing in 2000's: Aurbren

I have been with my partner 11 yrs and had an ex husband 10 yrs before him, both male. I have not had other partners than the two of them in that time since my ex husband and I decided to date only each other in 2005.

Yes my ID is still all female and in my female birth name. No I have not had surgery and have not been on hormones since 2011. Yes I still have a beard. Yes I like my beard.

Contact

Steven Dorsher

St Cloud, MN

Sometimes, Crosslake MN or Minneapolis MN

952-686-1925

320-406-3784

dorsher@alum.mit.edu

sdorsher@gmail.com

steven.susan.dorsher@outlook.com