Dr Hiranya Peiris

I am a Reader in Astronomy in the Astrophysics Group in the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy at UCL. I am also the coordinator of the CosmicDawn project, funded by the European Research Council under the FP7 Ideas programme. Prior to becoming a Lecturer in Cosmology at UCL in 2009, I was an STFC Advanced Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College Cambridge. Previously, I was a Hubble Fellow in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. I did my postgraduate research at the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. I was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, where I was a member of New Hall. I was born in Sri Lanka, a beautiful island in the Indian Ocean.

Research interests: Theoretical and observational cosmology, cosmic microwave background, large scale structure, early universe theoretical physics, stellar dynamics, galaxy evolution, statistical methods, optimal numerical algorithms.

Dr Jason McEwen

I am a Newton Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London (UCL) and a Core Team member of the ESA Planck satellite mission. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Electrical Engineering Institute at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). Before that I was a Research Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, affiliated with the Astrophysics Group of the Physics Department (the Cavendish) at the University of Cambridge.

Research interests: signal processing on the sphere, wavelets, optimal filtering, compressed sensing, applications to astrophysics, cosmology and radio interferometry.

Dr Aurélien Benoit-Lévy

I am a postdoctoral research associate working in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London. Prior to UCL, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. My main interests in Cosmology concerns the links and interactions between the matter in our Universe and the Cosmic Microwave background. I am a Core Team member of the Planck HFI collaboration, and I have recently joined the Euclid and Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaborations.

Research interests: observational cosmology, large-scale structure, cosmic microwave background.

Dr Stephen Feeney

I am a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London. I obtained my  PhD at UCL, under the supervision of Dr. Hiranya Peiris. I received my Master’s degree from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, where I was a member of Gonville and Caius College. Between my undergraduate and postgraduate study, I worked as a software engineer in environmental finance and web development.

Research interests: observational cosmology, cosmic microwave background, early-universe physics, machine learning, physical applications of Bayesian probability.

Dr Jonathan Frazer

I am a postdoctoral researcher at UCL in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, interested in the physics of the early universe. I recently finished my PhD at the University of Sussex where I was supervised by Professor Andrew Liddle. The title of my thesis was “Predictions in multifield inflation”. I received my Master’s degree in theoretical physics from Imperial College London.

Research interests: Theoretical cosmology, inflation, perturbation theory, the string landscape.

Boris Leistedt

I am studying towards a PhD under the supervision of Dr Hiranya Peiris. Prior to moving to UCL I received an engineering degree jointly from University of Mons (Belgium) and Supélec (France, T.I.M.E. scholarship) and a Master’s degree in Physics from University Orsay Paris Sud. I did my final dissertation under the supervision of Prof Marc Pirlot (UMons) and Prof Vincent Mousseau (École Centrale Paris) on the sequential learning of multicriteria decision models.

Research interests: observational cosmology, large-scale structure, early universe physics, signal processing, high-performance computing.

Alumni

Thibaut Josset (intern from ENS Cachan, 2012)

Simeon Bird (PhD, Cambridge 2007-2011)

Anjali Tripathi (MPhys, Cambridge 2009-2011)