Hi! I’m Ben, and I’m a current McWilliams Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to moving to the United States, I received my PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland as a Principal’s Career Development Scholar, where I was also part of the university’s Centre for Statistics. With a previous detour through a master’s degree in artificial intelligence as well as related work in the UK’s financial asset management sector before my doctoral studies, I’m also an accredited Graduate Statistician with the American Statistical Association, and part of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the new NSF AI Planning Institute located at Carnegie Mellon University.

Research groups:

• McWilliams Center for Cosmology
• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre
• NSF AI Planning Institute
• Cosmostatistics Initiative
• The Dark Energy Survey
• Rubin LSST DESC

Learned societies:

• RAS: Royal Astronomical Society (Fellow)
• ASA: American Statistical Association (GStat)
• IAA: International Astrostatistics Association (Member)

News and media:

• “Announcting the McWilliams/PSC Seed Grant 2021 recipients” (CMU)
• “Connecting emptiness” (COIN)
• “Dark Energy Survey scientist of the week” (DES)
• “Sight beyond sight: Teasing galaxies apart with deep learning” (COIN)
• “This AI system can generate images of artificial galaxies” (VentureBeat and others)
• “Fear of the dark: Caveats of using supernovae to probe the nature of dark energy” (COIN)
• “Now you see me: COIN extends the OC census in the solar neighborhood with Gaia DR2” (COIN)