I am a Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) in Pisa, Italy. My research interests are in 21cm cosmology, cosmological structure formation, Bayesian statistical analysis, and creating useful open-source software for scientific applications.
PhD in Astrophysics, 2017
University of Western Australia
BSc (Honours) in Physics, 2011
University of Western Australia
BSc in Mathematics, 2009
University of Queensland
The Experiment to Detect the Global Eor Signal is a “global 21cm signal” experiment. It reported the first evidence of the very first stars in the Universe in 2018.
I develop EDGES’ analysis pipeline for everything from data formats to calibration to data reduction and interpretation. I am particularly interested in validating our pipeline with Bayesian statistical models.
The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array is one of the largest radio interferometers in the world, and is looking to map the effects of the first stars, galaxies and black holes over the first billion years of the Universe.
I co-lead the Validation Team, developing increasingly realistic simulations of our observations at scale. I also lead the development of an interface to compute theoretical likelihoods on HERA data.
The SKA will be the largest radio telescope ever built, with a collecting area of over a square kilometre. It will be able to detect the faintest signals from the early Universe, and will be able to image the sky with unprecedented resolution.
I am a member of the EoR and Cosmic Dawn Science Working Group, contributing to the development of our tools and techniques, to be ready for the insane amount of data we’re going to get when SKA comes online.
21cmFAST is the premiere semi-numerical 21cm cosmological simulator. It is currently used by every 21cm cosmology experiment to derive predictions of the spatial distribution of 21cm brightness temperature, to compare to observations.
I am a core developer in this project. My role has been primarily to wrap the fast C-code of the original simulator into Python, so that it can be more widely and easily used. This also has the benefit of adding a number of tests so that future development is safer and so that the code can be trusted by its many users.
Browse the different codes I have created or am heavily involved in developing.
21cmMC uses 21cmFAST to compare observations with theory, and predict astrophysical and cosmological parameters. This is a beast of a process, since it must run thousands of cosmological simulations to generate the predictions. Thus, 21cmMC is highly parallelized with MPI and is geared to run on supercomputers.
21cmMC was originally written by Brad Greig. My primary role has been to integrate it with 21cmFAST v3+, and to improve the interface and extensibility.
21cmFAST is the premiere semi-numerical 21cm cosmological simulator. It is currently used by every 21cm cosmology experiment to derive predictions of the spatial distribution of 21cm brightness temperature, to compare to observations.
I am a core developer in this project. My role has been primarily to wrap the fast C-code of the original simulator into Python, so that it can be more widely and easily used. This also has the benefit of adding a number of tests so that future development is safer and so that the code can be trusted by its many users.