Will Percival has been awarded $250,000 in funding through through the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) 2025 Exploration Competition.
Exploration grants through the NFRF are intended to support high-risk, high-reward research. They support projects that push boundaries into new and exciting areas by bringing disciplines together and exploring new concepts that, while bold, have potential for significant impact.
Will Percival has been awarded funding to further the study of Dark Energy — the name given to the unknown phenomenon driving the accelerated expansion of the universe — is an exciting and evolving field of physics. Over the last year, experimental results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) have revolutionized the field, suggesting that dark energy is not constant as previously believed, but dynamic, with a density weakening over time.
This exciting discovery of dynamical dark energy has the potential of being confirmed or refuted by the careful matching of future empirical data to existing physical models. Over the next two years, Percival and his interdisciplinary team will adapt methodological expertise from the fields of biostatistics and computational statistics and apply these tools to cosmological data. Biostatistics and cosmology are both tasked with drawing robust conclusions from limited available data, and computational statistics handles the fitting of the complex statistical models required to achieve this.
Bringing together experts in these disparate fields, therefore, offers a chance to critically look at the new cosmological data from a novel viewpoint and confirm — or overturn – the discovery of dynamical dark energy. The ultimate aim of this project is to understand what we truly know from the new data about the physics of dark energy.
For more information about other NFRF awardees, see the University of Waterloo Science News article "Travis Craddock and Will Percival receive funding for bold, new research".