Hi! I’m Ben, and I’m a Lecturer in Predictive Analytics, or “Computational Soothsaying”, here at the University of Edinburgh, where I’m also currently the Director of the PhD Programme in Financial Technology and the Chair of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Data, Culture and Society. I’m a cosmologist by training and work primarily on machine learning and statistics.

Before moving back to Scotland, I was a McWilliams Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Physics in the United States, where I was also part of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the National Science Foundation’s AI Planning Institute for Data-Driven Discovery in Physics. Prior to my time in Pittsburgh and after spending some time working in the investment management sector, I completed my PhD in Astrophysics as a Principal’s Career Development Scholar at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Other qualifications include an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and an accreditation as a Professional Statistician by the American Statistical Association.

Research groups

• MSBE Group
• Centre for Statistics
• Cosmostatistics Initiative
• Edinburgh Centre for Financial Innovations
• Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research

Learned societies

• RAS: Royal Astronomical Society
• ASA: American Statistical Association
• IAU: International Astronomical Union
• IAA: International Astrostatistics Association