About
Howzit, I’m Aaron. I was born and raised on Oahu, went to Aina Haina, then Punahou, then to the mainland for college, came back to take care of family matters, taught math at some local high schools (Punahou, Kaiser, Roosevelt), and now I’m here. I’m a ceil(current_year – 2017.5) year grad student working with Ben Shappee on a supernova project. For the past couple years my favorite genre of music has been Japanese shoegaze. I like Mass of the Fermenting Dregs and イツエ in particular. My favorite hike is a short little walk Pele’s chair to the Makapu’u tidepools (Use caution if the tide or surf looks bad). Zippy’s is the best. I think pathfinder > dnd 3.5 > dnd 5 > dnd 4. I haven’t tried pathfinder 2 yet.
Research
Ph.D. Topic
I’m using the IfA’s unparalleled access to world class observatories to run a near-infrared observational campaign for type Ia supernovae. I put Hawai’i Supernova Flows on the web using a LEMP tech stack (python). Frontend features are minimal without an account, but the backend automatically checks with TNS for new targets, updates lightcurves from public all-sky surveys, queues and reduces UKIRT data, and fits lightcurves using SNooPy and SALT3. I have NIR observations of over 600 spectroscopically classified type Ia supernovae, more than any other NIR dataset (CSP DR3, 134; CfAIR2, 91).
Publications
- Interstellar Interlopers: Number Density and Origin of 'Oumuamua-like Objects (2018 ApJL, 855, 1, L10)
- Blast from the past: constraining progenitor models of SN 1972E (2021 MNRAS, 508, 3, 3649D)

Aaron Do