Dr. Marika Asgari is a Lecturer at the University of Hull, where she teaches courses on Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI. She completed her Postdoctoral at the University of Edinburgh after obtaining her PhD in cosmology from the same institution. She completed her Master's degree in Astrophysics from Bonn University, Germany, and her Bachelor's degree in Physics from Sharif University in Tehran. She has made notable contributions to the field of Cosmology with her research on the analysis and modeling of data from probes of large-scale structures. Her most notable publication is the KiDS-1000 cosmic shear analysis. She is currently serving as one of the coordinators for KiDS, holding one of the most senior roles. Dr. Asgari is an expert in statistical analysis, and in addition to using statistics, she has developed new methods that have been applied to data.
Benjamin Stolzner
Dr. Benjamin Stölzner is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He completed his B.Sc and M.Sc in Physics at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and PhD in Cosmology at University College London, UK. During his doctoral studies, He specialised in the study of the large-scale structure of the universe, with a focus on analysing the data from the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration (DESC) and the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) Collaboration.
Dr. Stölzner is working on the analysis of large-scale structure data, focusing on photometric redshifts of galaxies and weak lensing. He is a member of the DESC and KiDS collaborations.
James Nightingale
Dr. James Nightingale is an Observational Cosmologist at Durham University. He completed his PhD at the University of Nottingham. His research uses strong gravitational lensing to study dark matter, distant galaxies, and the largest black holes in the Universe. He leads the development of PyAutoLens, open-source software for analyzing strong lenses. He is an advocate for using the software as a platform to teach and has Jupyter Notebook online lecture series on gravitational lensing and statistics. As a spin-off to his Cosmology research, Dr. Nightingale works in close collaboration with NHS healthcare researchers, adapting statistical methods developed for Comoslogy to cancer research, as part of an Innovate UK clinical trial.
Richard Hayes
Richard Hayes is an accomplished Senior Software Engineer and consultant based in London, UK. He specializes in working with SMEs to bring deep science ideas to life and consulted on cloud architecture requirements and designed cloud platforms for analyzing genomic data to identify antibiotic candidates. Richard has also collaborated with academics on statistics software used in astronomy and medicine, and provided architectural direction on projects related to modeling the spread of COVID. As Head of Engineering at Scalpel Ltd, he built a powerful image data processing pipeline for machine learning in surgery and managed a team of software engineers and data scientists. His freelance work includes enhancing critical data science software for investment banks and developing applications to improve farming practices.
Sownak Bose
Dr. Sownak Bose is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, where his group works on applications of cosmological simulations to a variety of problems at the interface of particle physics, galaxy formation, and cosmology. His main interests at the moment include topics in near-field cosmology, large-scale structure, and tests of dark matter and dark energy. He received his undergraduate and Master’s degree in Physics from the University of Oxford in 2013 and subsequently obtained his PhD from Durham University in 2017. Dr. Bose was then an ITC Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University between 2017-2021, before returning to Durham in his current role and a long-term UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship grant. He has worked on some of the largest cosmological simulations to date, including the AbacusSummit project, currently, the primary cosmological simulations data set used in the DESI survey, and the new MillenniumTNG project launched in December 2022. His involvement in these projects has pushed the boundaries of high-performance computing and cosmological simulations and is primed for the upcoming era of large galaxy surveys.
Shaun Brown
Dr. Shaun Brown is a postdoctoral researcher at Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) in Durham. His research interests focus on understanding the role of both cosmology and baryons in the formation and evolution of structures in our Universe, from the small ultra-faint dwarf galaxies to giant clusters. He primarily explores this by studying and running a wide range of state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamic simulations.
Dr. Brown completed his Master's in Physics at the University of Nottingham before moving to Liverpool to do his PhD at the Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI) worked with Prof. Ian McCarthy. There, he was part of the group running and analysing the BAHAMAS simulations and its successor, BAHAMAS-XL. These are large-volume hydrodynamic simulations that focus on evaluating the effect of feedback on large-scale structures. His research focused on studying the link between the initial primordial density field and the internal structure of dark matter haloes. That was achieved by running a suite of simulations with systematically different cosmologies, which now constitute some of the largest cosmological variations run to date. From these simulations, he developed an analytic model for the density profiles of DM haloes as a function of mass, redshift, and cosmology. His current research focuses on exploring how well small-scale cosmological extensions to LCDM, such as warm dark matter, can be discerned from uncertainties in galaxy formation.
