Congratulations to CITA Post Doctoral Fellow Biprateep Dey, who was recently distinguished with an Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Topical Group on Data Science (GDS) of the American Physical Society (APS).
Biprateep is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellow at the Department of Statistical Sciences and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto. He also holds joint appointments at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) as a CITA fellow and at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics as a Dunlap Fellow.
Dr. Dey obtained his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in the summer of 2024 with his award-winning dissertation “Cosmic cartography: Photometric Redshifts for the Next-Generation of Sky Surveys”. The thesis addresses the challenges of established photometric redshift estimation techniques by leveraging modern statistical machine-learning tools to improve photometric redshift estimation. Photometric redshifts are estimates of the distances to other galaxies obtained from imaging data only.
“I am deeply honored to receive the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Physical Society’s Topical Group on Data Science”, shares Dr. Dey. “This recognition affirms the importance of interdisciplinary research that successfully combines the tools and methodologies of astrophysics and statistical machine learning.”
His work at CITA involves 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 has been recognised as a “builder” of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration for his “outstanding contributions to the target selection and leadership of the ECS committee”.