Luisa Lucie-Smith

Astrophysicist and Junior Professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

I am currently 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.

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 was lucky enough to spend six months at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the USA, funded by the University Research Association to work on a project with Dr. Brian Nord. 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 Hamburg as a Junior Professor to start my own research group.

You can find a more formal description of my background in my CV and a list of my papers on arXiv.