Dr. Marjorie Decleir

My name is Marjorie Decleir. I was born and raised in Belgium. It was at the age of 16 that I discovered my interest for science and astronomy in particular, while attending evening courses at a public observatory. This encouraged me to study Physics and Astronomy at Ghent University, where I obtained my Master's degree in 2015. I pursued my passion for astronomy and did a PhD at the same University, as an FWO (Research Foundation - Flanders) fellow. I worked with Prof. Ilse De Looze and Prof. Maarten Baes as my supervisors. After graduating in november 2019, my husband and I moved to the United States, and I started my first postdoc position at Space Telescope in Baltimore, MD. Since December 2023, I am an ESA (European Space Agency) Research Fellow at STScI, where I am part of the ISM* group.

DRESSCode

In order to study dust attenuation in nearby galaxies, I obtained Swift UVOT (Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope) images to get a better coverage in the UV. Since the UVOT photon-counter was designed to observe high energetic events, its standard data reduction pipeline is only applicable to point sources. To overcome this, I developed a fully automatic data reduction and calibration pipeline (DRESSCode - Data Reduction of Extended Swift Sources Code; Decleir et al. in prep.) tailored to extended sources such as nearby galaxies. The pipeline starts from the raw UV data and delivers calibrated and science-ready images. It includes astrometric corrections, flux calibrations (such as corrections for coincidence loss, large scale sensitivity variations and time dependent sensitivity loss), and coaddition of multiple exposures. DRESSCode is available to the community on GitHub, and has a website with detailed user documentation.