I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

I work at the interface of cosmological large-scale structure and galactic astrophysics, studied through the lens of advanced statistical and machine-learning methodologies. My research develops new tests of the standard model of cosmology – gravity and the dark sector – using astrophysical objects, mainly galaxies and stars, and seeks to extract maximum information from galaxy surveys using statistically rigorous Bayesian forward modelling approaches. I am broadly interested in galaxy formation and the galaxy–halo connection, local large-scale structure and constrained cosmological simulations, the Hubble tension, tests of the cosmological principle, and symbolic regression and other forms of explainable AI applied to astrophysics or cosmology. I’m a member of the Aquila Consortium for Bayesian large-scale structure inference.

Brief background

I joined the ICG as a Senior Research Fellow in January 2022. Previously I held a McWilliams Fellowship at the McWilliams Center for Cosmology, Carnegie Mellon University (2021), and a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford (2017–2021). I received my PhD in Physics from Stanford University in 2017, supervised by Risa Wechsler, and my MPhys in Astrophysics and Theoretical Physics from the University of Oxford in 2012, supervised by Subir Sarkar.

Contact

I am always happy to hear about potential collaborations and to chat about science – drop me an email at harry.desmond@port.ac.uk.