I am a Junior Professor at the Hamburg Observatory at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
My research work focuses on studying how galaxies and large-scale structures of the Universe form and finding ways to extract fundamental physics from them, using a combination of numerical simulations and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. In particular, I have been developing explainable AI models which, contrary to traditional ``black-box'' machine learning models, allow us to interpret what the algorithms have learnt and explain them in terms of the underlying physics.
I care a lot about diversity and inclusivity in academia, and I was the organizer of the Welfare and Equity Group at MPA. I also love to talk about fun and mysterious aspects of our Universe to the public, so feel free to contact me about public outreach events.
I started my academic path at Imperial College London, working with Prof. Arttu Rajantie, on the production of a gravitational wave background during the epoch of reheating. I then did my PhD at University College London (UCL) on Insights into cosmological structure formation with machine learning, under the supervision of Prof. Hiranya Peiris and Prof. Andrew Pontzen. During my PhD, I spent six months at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the USA, funded by the University Research Association to work on a project on deep learning applications to cosmology. I stayed at UCL for a one-year postdoctoral research position after I completed my PhD, working in the GMGalaxies research group led by Andrew Pontzen. I then moved to Germany as a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching, Germany where I spent four years. In November 2024, I moved to the Hamburg Observatory at Hamburg University as a Junior Professor to start my own research group.