Dr Vakili

The research highlight of the day was a beautiful PhD defense by my student MJ Vakili (NYU). Vakili presented two big projects from his thesis: In one, he has developed fast mock-catalog software for understanding cosmic variance in large-scale structure surveys. In the other, he has built and run an inference method to learn the pixel-convolved point-spread function in a space-based imaging device.
In both cases, he has good evidence that his methods are the best in the world. (We intend to write up the latter in the Summer.) Vakili's thesis is amazingly broad, going from pixel-level image processing work that will serve weak-lensing and other precise imaging tasks, all the way up to new methods for using computational simulations to perform principled inferences with cosmological data sets. He was granted a PhD at the end of an excellent defense and a lively set of arguments in the seminar room and in committee. Thank you, MJ, for a great body of work, and a great contribution to my scientific life.