Events

"Mapping Alien Worlds: from Infernal to Habitable Worlds"

Lisa Dang is an Assistant Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of Waterloo. She uses various telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope, to study the diversity of exoplanets and their climates. Her work involves mapping atmospheric temperature structures and constituents of exoplanets, with a particular focus on lava worlds. She also has experience in planetary microlensing and is involved with the Ariel Mission conduct population-level analysis of exoplanet atmospheres. Previously, she was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at the University of Montreal, specializing in exoplanet and exoplanetary atmosphere research. Lisa earned her PhD in physics from McGill University, where she also completed her undergraduate degree. During her graduate studies, she held a visiting research fellowship at Caltech/IPAC to work on the Spitzer Microlensing Campaign.

"Canadian-Chilean array for radio transient studies (CHARTS)"

Tomás Cassanelli is an astronomer and assistant professor specializing in astronomical instrumentation at Universidad de Chile. He holds a PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the University of Toronto, where he focused on fast radio burst (FRB) localization at the time of detection using very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI). His research spans radio astronomy, including analog and digital components, as well as fast optical astronomy with fast photon counters. Tomás' scientific interests lie in the rapidly varying transient sky such as pulsars, FRBs, and long period transients, and interferometric methods across radio to optical wavelengths.

Jiaming Pan is a Ph.D. candidate in Physics at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on constraining modified gravity and dark energy to understand the physical origin of cosmic acceleration. He is an active member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, where he has contributed to analyses of dark energy and tests of gravity, including extended dark energy analysis with BAO measurements and modified gravity constraints from full-shape clustering. He is also developing methods to use gravitational-wave “standard sirens,” particularly through cross-correlation with galaxy surveys, as independent probes of the Hubble constant.

Woorak Choi is a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University. He completed his PhD in 2024 at Yonsei University, South Korea. Woorak's research focuses on understanding the evolution of the ISM and star formation in extreme environments, ranging from galactic centers to galaxy clusters. As a radio astronomer, he primarily uses radio telescopes such as ALMA and VLA, but has recently begun working with JWST data. Woorak is also interested in incorporating numerical simulations to complement observational studies.

Dr Adrian Bayer (Princeton) works on the intersection of astrophysics and machine learning. Recent interests include: creating multi-probe cosmological simulations for galaxy, lensing, and CMB surveys; performing optimal and interpretable cosmological inference by sampling high-dimensional parameter spaces to reconstruct the Universe's initial conditions and using simulation-based inference; and developing statistical techniques to find astronomical signals in large and noisy spaces, such as for super massive black hole binaries and exoplanets. 

"Modeling Galaxy Clusters for Cosmology"

Prof. Camille Avestruz is an assistant professor in the department of physics at the University of Michigan with research interests that span astrophysics, cosmology, and computation. Her primary focus is to understand the evolution of clusters of galaxies. Other aspects of her work prepare for the next decade of observations, which will produce unprecedented volumes of data. 

"DESI DR2: Survey Overview, Cosmological Constraints from BAO, and Preparation for Full-Shape Analyses"

Ardaud de Mattia (CEA Saclay) is a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, where he has worked successively on photometric systematics (through image simulations), clustering catalogs and two-point statistics, and cosmological parameter inference. Arnaud is deeply involved in pipeline development for DESI — from catalog creation to cosmological constraints — leveraging GPU computing and automatic differentiation whenever relevant. He is also interested in galaxy field-level inference as a more comprehensive approach to cosmological analysis.

"From Science to Data Science: How to Land a Job in Industry."

Elena Massara is a Machine Learning Scientist at TD Bank and holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from SISSA (Italy, 2016). She previously held postdoctoral research positions at the University of California, Berkeley; the Flatiron Institute in New York; and the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics in Canada.

"Halo Clustering, Galaxy Clustering, and the Theory and Detection of Assembly Bias"

Andrew Zentner is Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2007. Originally, from Queens, in New York City, Andrew earned a B. S. in Electrical Engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a unique, tuition-free school in New York’s East Village, in 1998. He earned his Ph. D. in Physics from The Ohio State University in 2003. Subsequently, Andrew conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago where he was a Kavli Fellow and a National Science Foundation Fellow before joining the faculty at Pittsburgh. 

"Probing the Dark Sector: Implications of DESI's Dynamic Dark Energy Results"

Sven’s (UCSC) scientific journey has been shaped by trying to ensure accurate and precise results from weak lensing surveys. His contributions to this field are both direct investigations of potential systematic biases (such as variable survey depth) as well as the establishment of higher-order lensing statistics (persistent homology and third-order shear statistics, in collaboration with Pierre) for a robust cosmological inference. As a member of DESI, he performed the validation of Galaxy Lensing measurements for subsequent cosmological analyses.