Designed a miniaturized ion thruster which will be the chief propulsion for the GraceSAT mission series at Infinity Space
Remodeled WHT–44 Hall effect thruster using CAD and performed simulation-based analysis using COMSOL to analyze cathode degradation rate
Awards & Memberships
LISA Symposium Travel Grant Awardee [NASA-GSFC] ($1400)April 2026
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Awardee ($9900)May – August 2024
LISA - Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Consortium (Community Member and LECS Mentee)May 2025 – Present
American Physical Society (Matching Membership Fellow)Dec 2023 – Present
NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory – Dark Matter Sub-Working GroupMarch – Dec 2024
Stanford Startup Society MemberJanuary – July 2024
Teaching Experience
Graduate course on Hall Effect Thrusters (Electric Propulsion)
Feb 2025 – Present
Collaborating with Dr. Dan Lev (HPEPL, Georgia Tech) on developing a graduate-level course on Hall Effect Thrusters
Performed finite element simulations (FEMM) and developed an estimator tool for calculating solenoid design parameters in HETs
Google Developer Students University Chapter(Data Science Core team Lead)
August 2023- 2024
Hosted Data Science workshops to engage and involve students in activities pertaining to Data Analysis, Data Visualization and elementary Data Management.
Designed and organized a Data Science Hackathon to gamify data vizulization basics for freshmen from across the university.
SchoolHouse SAT Bootcamp Peer Tutor
Feb – April 2024
Mentored 6 Junior year High School students for the SAT math section
Explored all microcontroller demo boards and learned Assembly coding to host a demo workshop to increase lab reach.
Workshops & Presentations
American Physical Society Global Physics Summit meeting 2026March 2026 — Oral presentation on Omniformer project
Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop 2025December 2025 — Abstract for poster presentation was accepted but due to Visa waitlist unable to attend
PhysCOS Second Early Career WorkshopSeptember 2025
2025 Sagan Summer Workshop: Exoplanetary DemographicsJuly 2025 — Presented on a group assigned project amongst 10 other teams
Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (GWOSC) Open Data WorkshopMay 2025
Physics of the Cosmos Early Career WorkshopNovember 2024
Research
A Comparative Evaluation of Transitional and Full Protoplanetary Disks
March 2025 – Present — Supervisor: Dr. Charles J Law
Imaged and analyzed Submillimeter Array observations of a sample of transition disks
OmniFormer: Context-aware transformer localizing transient noise sources in LIGO
Nov 2024 – Present — Supervisor: Dr. Marco Cavaglia
Designed a transformer model to source transient noise origins in advanced LIGO systems
Tested on a curated dataset of 1.2B samples over 12 parameters for the O3a data run
StrCGAN: A Generative Framework for Stellar Image Restoration
Jan – September 2025 — Under peer Review, WACV 2026
Developed a Cyclic GAN optimized for astronomy, targeting low SNR dataset
Incorporated 3D convolutional layers to capture volumetric data and depth information for NIR to optical wavelength, all-sky survey groundtruth data
Benchmarking Deep Learning Object Detection Models on Feature-deficient dataset
Dec 2024 – May 2025 — Peer review Accepted, CAIP 2025
Demonstrated that most common detection models with robust benchmarks on standard datasets struggle with Feature-Deficient astronomy data
Utilizing Lidar to quantify the complexities of Autonomous Driving Environments
May – August 2024 — In-person, Edmonton, Canada — Supervisor: Prof. Karim El-Basyouny
Worked on preprocessing pipelines for integrating LiDAR data into autonomous vehicles
Developed ROS scripts to Lidar + IMU sensor fusion data for enhanced point clouds
VQ-VAE powered augmentation for metal defect segmentation
Image augmentation pipeline with thermal warping and granular defect stimulants
Leveraged VQ-VAE to enhance training set diversity, by predicting noise characteristics
Publications
Papers
Parmar, S., Parmar, S., Law, C. 2025. An SMA Survey of UV-driven Chemical Tracers in Transition Disks[RNAAS Vol 9, No 12] doi.org/10.3847/2515-5172/ae2a22
Parmar, S., 2025. StrCGAN: A Generative Framework for Stellar Image Restoration. arXiv:2509.19805 [Under review, WACV 2026 conference]
Parmar, S., 2025. Benchmarking Deep Learning-Based Object Detection Models on Feature Deficient Astrophotography Imagery Dataset. arXiv:2508.06537 [Accepted, CAIP 2025 Conference]