CITA welcomes six Fellows to cohort 2024

CITA extends a warm welcome to our incoming Fellows and National Fellows. In September, we will be joined by four Fellows at our flagship at the University of Toronto and two national fellows at McGill University and the University of Victoria. We are committed to providing post-doctoral training for early career researchers in the field of Theoretical Astrophysics and are excited about the contributions these outstanding researchers will bring to CITA.

Biprateep Dey

Biprateep Dey is joining CITA as a CITA/DAA/Dunlap Postdoctoral Fellow and a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow with Joshua Speagle from DAA and the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Toronto. Biprateep specializes in developing statistical machine-learning tools to study the formation and evolution of the Universe and the galaxies within. He also works on designing large astronomical sky surveys which enable such statistical studies and is a “builder” of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration. Biprateep Dey is passionate about developing a scientific community, which is accessible and welcoming to all. He is scheduled to complete his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in the Summer of 2024.

Pavan Vynatheya

Pavan Vynatheya is joining CITA as a Postdoctoral Fellow. He works on stellar evolution and dynamics, with specific interests in binary evolution, multiple-star systems and encounters in star clusters. A key area of his research involves understanding the long-term evolution of triple and quadruple-star systems. He has predicted potential gravitational wave progenitors and investigated the dynamical stability of these stellar systems. Additionally, he is deeply interested in two-body interactions within dense star cluster environments, which can lead to tidal disruption events, stellar collisions and more. In the course of his research, Pavan has utilized a range of tools including hydrodynamics, N-body dynamics, population synthesis and machine learning.

Pavan received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany in 2024. As a CITA fellow, he aims to explore further the intricate interplay between stellar evolution and dynamics, while actively contributing to and collaborating with the scientific community in Canada.

Duo Xu

Dr. Duo Xu is joining CITA as a CITA Postdoctoral Fellow and a Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow with Peter Martin. His research focuses on star formation, stellar feedback, and turbulence, with a particular focus on applying machine learning techniques. Duo employs various machine learning approaches, particularly deep learning models such as state-of-the-art generative models like denoising diffusion probabilistic models, to bridge the gap between synthetic observations from simulations and real observational data. This helps infer the intrinsic physical properties and conditions of the interstellar medium and the star formation processes in our galaxy.

Dr. Xu completed his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2021. Prior to joining CITA, he was an Origins Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia.

Akshara Viswanathan

Akshara Viswanathan will join CITA as a CITA National Fellow at the University of Victoria with the Near Field Cosmology group with Julio Navarro and Kim Venn. She earned her PhD at the Kapteyn Institute at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands under the supervision of Else Starkenburg and Amina Helmi. Akshara obtained her Bachelor in Engineering with distinction from Anna University in Chennai, India. Her initiation into astronomy research began with a 2018 Mitacs Globalink fellowship at the University of Victoria. She proceeded to obtain a Master in Astrophysics from the University of Glasgow, UK. During the final year of her PhD, Akshara has been working with the Nearby Universe group at the Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute in New York. She has pursued astronomy research in five different countries over the course of six years. She is very active in astronomy outreach, conferences and symposiums and believes in open access to science. Akshara’s research interests and expertise lie at the intersection of galactic archaeology, dynamics and the study of metal enrichment in the early universe. As a CITA fellow she hopes to refine models of galaxy formation in the early universe by combining astrometric and spectroscopic observations with cosmological simulations.

Mike Wilensky

Mike Wilensky is joining CITA as a National Fellow with hosts Adrian Liu and Jonathan Sievers at McGill University. During his doctoral studies at the University of Washington, he theoretically and observationally characterized the systematic effects of radio frequency interference (RFI) on the search for the 21-cm signal from cosmic reionization, and successfully improved 21-cm power spectrum upper limits using an RFI detection algorithm of his own design. Mike is deeply interested in applying rigorous statistical methods to cosmological and astrophysical observations, mainly focusing on radio cosmology. One of his major projects, done in collaboration with researches from the University of Mancheste Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, focuses on the implementation of a fully Bayesian 21-cm power spectrum estimation pipeline. The pipeline provides a full characterization of instrumental effects and uncertainties on the power spectrum measurement and thereby allows for a more pristine understanding of the underlying physics. Mike delights in discussing and exploring various use cases for his flexible Bayesian jackknife framework, named Chiborg, that assesses statistical tension between redundant measurements and subsequently cross-calibrates them. He hopes that bringing high-speed, principled statistical methods to further reaches in astronomy will ultimately allow researchers to extract the most meaning possible from observations of the Universe.

Aris Lalakos

Aris Lalakos will be joining CITA as a CITA Postdoctoral Fellow in 2025. He uses general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations to understand how supermassive black holes feed and may consequently form relativistic and highly energetic jets. Specifically, he investigates how such jets impact the dense interstellar medium, as well as their broader influence on the dynamics of their host galaxies.

After finishing his PhD at Northwestern University in the summer of 2024, Aris will spend a year as a researcher at California Institute of Technology.