Portrait of Jamila Taaki

Jamila Taaki

Signal processing for exoplanet detection and imaging

I'm a postdoctoral researcher at STScI, advised by Laurent Pueyo, and collaborating with Marshall Perrin and Professor Anand Bhattad (JHU Computer Science). Previously I was a Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society (University of Michigan), mentored by Professor Lia Corrales (Astronomy) and Professor Alfred Hero (EECS). I completed my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, advised by Professor Farzad Kamalabadi and Professor Athol Kemball. Before Illinois, I completed an MSc in Astrophysics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Research interests: detection theory for transit photometry, sub-µas astrometry for stellar-surface mapping, and starshade high-contrast imaging.

Download CV (PDF) Research Statement (PDF)

Publications

  • 2026 Taaki, Corrales, Hero. Using Astrometry to Break Degeneracies in Stellar Surface Mapping. The Astrophysical Journal. Link
  • 2026 Taaki, Corrales, Hero. Identifiability of Rotating Stellar Surfaces From Astrometric Jitter. ICASSP 2026. arXiv:2511.07706
  • 2025 Taaki, Kamalabadi, Kemball, Corrales, Hero. Efficient Exoplanet Imaging Simulations of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. The Astronomical Journal. Link
  • 2025 Taaki, Kemball, Kamalabadi. PyStarshade: Simulating High-Contrast Imaging of Exoplanets with Starshades. Journal of Open Source Software. Link
  • 2025 Taaki, Kemball, Kamalabadi. A Search for Exoplanet Candidates in TESS 2-minute Light Curves Using Joint Bayesian Detection. The Astronomical Journal. Link
  • 2024 Taaki, Kemball, Kamalabadi. Robust Detrending of Spatially Correlated Systematics in Kepler Light Curves Using Low-Rank Methods. The Astronomical Journal. Link
  • 2020 Taaki, Kamalabadi, Kemball. Bayesian Methods for Joint Exoplanet Transit Detection and Systematic Noise Characterisation. The Astronomical Journal. Link

ORCID

Projects / Software

jittermap animation: sunspot groups of Carrington rotation 2156 on a rotating star

jittermap

Stellar surface mapping from photometry and astrometry, with Bayesian inversion.

Code
Starshade pupil and PSF thumbnail

PyStarshade

Fresnel diffraction simulations of starshades with realistic telescope apertures.

Code
Raw and detrended light curve panels

spatial-detrend

Low-rank spatial detrending of Kepler and TESS detector systematics.

Code

Other

Contact

Email: xiaziyna@gmail.com · jtaaki@stsci.edu