Alexander Brisebois
Alex is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on characterizing the history of large-scale structure formation and constraining the properties of dark matter on cosmological and galactic scales. His work combines theoretical modelling with observation probes including weak gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering, and stellar streams.
Alvaro Callejas Tavera
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico. Currently, I am developing machine learning algorithms for photometric redshift estimation within the Legacy Survey of Space and Time collaboration.
My research focuses on combining machine learning, statistical methods, and high-performance computing to improve the accuracy and robustness of photometric redshift predictions for large astronomical surveys. I am also interested in time-domain methods and their applications to astronomy, including the analysis and characterization of variable and transient astrophysical sources.
Andrew Engel
Andrew is a Physics PhD student studying at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on applications of computer vision to astronomy, the low surface brightness universe, physics-informed learning, and uncertainty quantification. Prior to returning to school, Andrew was a staff scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory studying the dynamics of neural networks over training. He graduated from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2020.
Colin W. Macrie
Andrew is a Physics PhD student studying at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on applications of computer vision to astronomy, the low surface brightness universe, physics-informed learning, and uncertainty quantification. Prior to returning to school, Andrew was a staff scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory studying the dynamics of neural networks over training. He graduated from University+C4 of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2020.
Gideon McFarland
Gideon is a graduate student at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory with broad interests in large-scale structure cosmology. He uses the extremes of the cosmic density field (cosmic voids and massive galaxy clusters) to probe the nature of dark energy. Gideon is especially interested in cosmology using the Rubin Observatory, and how to accurately propagate photometric redshift uncertainty into cosmological analyses.
Hannah Skobe
Hannah is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University in the McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics. She is interested in binary stellar evolution, both intermediate steps and mergers. Her research seeks to understand the rate and formation pathways of double compact object mergers and how this can inform gravitational wave astronomy and multimessenger studies involving transients. She aims to address these questions from both observational and theoretical standpoints.
James Sunseri
James Sunseri is a PhD student at Princeton University working on creating cost-effective high-fidelity simulation mocks of halo-scale observables. By cross correlating data from multiple surveys (e.g. LSST, DESI, Simons Observatory), one can study the distribution of matter around galaxies. He aims to use these cosmological datasets to study astrophysical processes that shape galaxy formation and the formation of large-scale structure in the cosmic web.
Jasmine Anderson-Baldwin
Jasmine is originally from Auckland, New Zealand and is currently a PhD student in the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Her research investigates transient populations within Milky Way stellar clusters. Using dynamical simulations of open clusters, she aims to provide a library of synthetic star clusters, which can be used to predict the rates and properties of transients such as X-ray binaries, cataclysmic variables, and compact mergers that may be observed by surveys such as LSST.
Joann Jones
Joann Jones is an astrophysics PhD student at the University of Chicago and the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics. She is interested in theoretical and observational multiprobe cosmology. More specifically, she works on modeling and constraining different cosmological theories using numerical techniques and observations of the cosmic microwave background, surveys of large scale structure, and light from supernovae.
Julia Perła
Julia is a PhD student at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland. Her research focuses on physical properties of asteroids, including spin and shape modeling, as well as size and bulk density determination.
Kaia Atzberger
Kaia is an astronomy graduate student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Virginia. Her current research focuses on using metallicity-sensitive DECam photometry and high-resolution Magellan spectroscopy to study diffuse Milky Way satellites and their faint stellar streams.
Margaret Shepherd
Margaret, a PhD student in astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studies how the rate of nuclear transients is influenced by the star formation history of the host galaxy, and what that means for the formation mechanisms of the transients. Margaret focuses on tidal disruption events (TDEs) and has recently begun researching quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs) as well.
Nikoo Hosseininezhad
Nikoo is a PhD student in astrophysics at the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research focuses on white dwarf asteroseismology using TESS photometry. Using 20-s and 120-s cadence light curves, she measures pulsation periods, rotation rates, and mode coherence of white dwarfs across the sky.
Peter Ma
Peter is a second-year Astrophysics PhD student at UC Berkeley who broadly works on integrating ML and GPU-accelerated computing throughout the discovery pipeline. He currently works with Josh Bloom and Steve Kahn on developing and deploying a real time AI model to help control and operate the active optics system at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Pranav Satheesh
Pranav is a PhD candidate at the University of Florida studying the formation, dynamics, and mergers of supermassive black holes and their role in galaxy evolution. His research uses cosmological simulations to model supermassive black hole growth and dynamics and to make predictions for multi-messenger observations. He is particularly interested in gravitational-wave signatures from supermassive black hole binaries, as well as electromagnetic observations of dual and offset active galactic nuclei (AGNs).
Sam Hemmelgarn
Sam is a Ph.D student in Astronomy and Planetary Science at Northern Arizona University. Her current research focuses on the Centaur population. Centaurs are small bodies of the Solar System orbiting between Jupiter and Neptune that show properties of both asteroids and comets. She is conducting a broadband color survey of Centaurs to investigate how their surface properties evolve as they migrate from the Kuiper Belt toward the inner Solar System. Sam is also stacking archival DECam images to search for activity in faint, serendipitously detected Centaurs, a pipeline that will naturally extend to LSST. Previous research includes modeling meteor showers to search for their long-period comet parent bodies and developing a composition-based meteor classification framework using machine learning.
Shashwat Sourav
I work at the intersection of AI, astrophysics, and scientific discovery. My research focuses on building trustworthy AI systems for science, with an emphasis on hypothesis generation, scientific reasoning, machine unlearning, and representation learning for physical data. My broader goal is to create AI systems that can reason from scientific problems to mechanism-grounded hypotheses while remaining interpretable, robust, and useful for real scientific discovery.
Tanner O’Dwyer
I am a current graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in Baltimore Maryland. My research focuses on Radio observations and afterglow modeling of Type Ic-BL Supernovae exploring their distinct yet not fully understood connection to Long GRBs, as well as observations of Binary Neutron Star mergers and their connections to Short GRBs.
Xianzhe TZ Tang
I have a broad interest in Cosmology and data analysis. I am currently focused on the field of Astrophysics, especially in understanding the dynamics of the cosmos and the nature of Dark Energy and Dark Matter, with a particular emphasis on the Type Ia Supernovae cosmology and phenomena of gravitational lensing.
Zewei “Jason” Wu
Zewei “Jason” is a first-year astrophysics PhD student at UC San Diego. He is a theorist working on galaxy formation simulations. His current work focuses on the evolution of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies with a focus on population III star formation, gas physics, and cosmic reionization. Zewei pays particular interests to forward-modeling observables for upcoming surveys like LSST.