Hi! I’m Ben, and I’m a final-year PhD candidate in astrophysics and Principal’s Career Development Scholar at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy. With a previous detour through a master’s degree in artificial intelligence and a specialization in machine learning, as well as related research and development 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 University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Statistics. My primary research area is cosmology, with a strong grounding in methods of the aforementioned fields.

Research groups:

• CfS: Centre for statistics
• IfA: Institute for Astronomy
• DES: The Dark Energy Survey
• COIN: Cosmostatistics Initiative

Learned societies:

• RAS: Royal Astronomical Society (Fellow)
• ASA: American Statistical Association (GStat)
• IMS: Institute of Mathematical Statistics (Member)
• IAA: International Astrostatistics Association (Member)
• ISBA: International Society for Bayesian Analysis (Member)

News and media:

• “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)