Hi! I’m Ben, and I’m a second-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, I’m also an accredited Graduate Statistician with the American Statistical Association. My primary research area is cosmology, with a strong grounding in methodologies of the aforementioned fields.

Research groups:

• 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:

• “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)