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Welcome to my Homepage! |
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I'm an astrophysicist interested in galaxies, cosmology, and machine learning. My work focuses on analyzing large astronomical data sets to extract fundamental insights into our Universe. I'm a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration and also work with data from other large-scale galaxy surveys like the Dark Energy Survey, the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey, and the Kilo-Degree Survey. The following broad questions drive my research.
- What are the properties of dark energy and dark matter? Are they correctly predicted by the standard model of cosmology?
- Does general relativity hold on cosmological scales? Does it correctly predict the observed cosmic gravitational lensing as well as the dynamics of galaxies?
- What is the relationship between galaxies and dark matter halos, the so-called galaxy-halo connection? Do current models of galaxy formation correctly predict this relation?
- What are ideal methods to extract information from large astronomical data sets in an unbiased and maximally informative way?
I'm an assistant professor at American University. Before coming to AU, I completed my bachelor's degree at the Free University of Berlin. Afterward, I obtained a master's degree from the University of Heidelberg. I also participated in a half-year exchange program at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a one-year exchange program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Frank van den Bosch at Yale University. Afterward, I was a Cosmology Fellow appointed jointly by the University of California, Santa Cruz and Stanford University before being a Leinweber Fellow at the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan.