International Astrostatistics Association

ELECTIONS 2020ELECTIONS 2020

Council Members 2021-2023, 50 words summaries

Aneta Siemiginowska

(elected President) is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Chandra X-ray Center of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. She is a founding member of the CHASC Astrostatistics Center, promoting collaborations between astrophysicists and statisticians. She served as Chair of the American Astronomical Society Working Group on Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics (2013-2019). Her main statistical interests include principled and advanced statistical methods for X-ray data analysis. She studies extragalactic radio sources and quasars, and has discovered a number of hundred-kiloparsec long relativistic X-ray jets associated with distant quasars.

Sara Algeri

is an Assistant Professor in the School of Statistics at the University of Minnesota. In August 2018 she completed her doctoral studies at Imperial College London (London, UK). Her research interests mainly lie in astrostatistics, computational statistics, nonparametric statistics, and large-scale inference. The main purpose of her work is to provide highly generalizable statistical solutions that directly address fundamental questions in the physical sciences, and can at the same time be easily applied to any other scientific problem following a similar statistical paradigm. She has been an active member of astrostatistics organizations, including serving as Program Chair for the Astrostatistics Interest Group of the American Statistical Association.

Stefano Andreon

is an astronomer of INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, also serves as Member of the Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics Commission Organizing Committee of IAU, and is director of the Italian summer school on Astrostatistics. Stefano teaches Astrostatistics in several european universities (>15 in 9 countries thus far) and he authored the book "Bayesian Methods for the Physical Sciences" (Springer). 2016 IAA fellow. His main astronomical interest is understanding how galaxies and galaxy clusters evolve from an observational point of view and using Bayesian methods. See here

Jessi Cisewski-Kehe

is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her main statistical work is in astrostatistics, approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), and topological data analysis (TDA). The main areas of astronomy that she works in are related to exoplanets, large-scale structure, modeling the IGM using the Lyman- alpha forest, and the stellar initial mass function.

Rafael de Souza

is a researcher of UNC at Chapel Hill, providing statistical expertise to the nuclear physics group. He is the current Vice-President for Development of the IAA, and the founder and chair of the Cosmostatistics Initiative (COIN). Among his contributions to IAA, worth mentioning 2,000 pro-accounts for IAA members sponsored by the web-based latex environment Overleaf, which he personally negotiated with the Company CEO. Finally, he recently published the book Bayesian Models for Astrophysical data, by Cambridge University Press 2017, and his research interests range from applications of machine learning to hierarchical Bayesian models in extragalactic Astrophysics and Cosmology.

Matthew Graham

is a Research Professor at Caltech, and the Project Scientist for the Zwicky Transient Facility. He has been very active in the development of the Virtual Observatory, both through the US NVO/VAO and IVOA, and the field of Astroinformatics. His work centers on the applications of variouss Machine Learnning and statistics tools for the analysis of large sky surveys. He has published a number of important papers, and taught at a number of summer schools and other venues.

David W. Hogg

is the Astronomical Data Group Leader at the Flatiron Institute. His research is computational data analysis, spanning all scales from exoplanets to large-scale structure, employing both Bayesian and classical-statistics techniques. He writes open-source data- analysis software and open-access pedagogical statistics content, and he works on the engineering underlying large astronomical surveys.

Andrew Jaffe

is Professor of Astrophysics & Cosmology at Imperial College London, specialising in statistical analysis of cosmological data, especially from the CMB and cosmic shear surveys. He is Head of Astrophysics and a member of the ICIC. He graduated from the Universities of Yale and then Chicago, with a Ph.D. in \u2018Quasi-linear Evolution of Compensated Cosmological Perturbations: The Nonlinear Sigma Model\u2019 before moving to CITA as a postdoctoral fellow and then to Berkeley as Assistant Research Physicist/CfPA Fellow, before his appointment as PPARC Advanced Fellow and then faculty at Imperial College London. He is a named Gruber prize winner with the Planck team.

Vinay Kashyap

is an Astrophysicist specializing in solar and stellar coronae, astrostatistics, and algorithmic tools for the analysis of high-energy astronomical data. He is a calibration scientist at the Chandra X-ray Observatory, at the Center for Astrophysics at Cambridge, MA. He is a charter member of the CHASC Astrostatistics Center, and is currently Chair of the Astrostatistics Interest Group of AmStat. He also leads the Calibration Statistics Working Group of the International Astronomical Consortium for High-Energy Calibration, and the informal Lynx Astrostatistics Working Group, and is a member of several Astrostatistics organizations.

Francois Lanusse

is a CNRS researcher, part of CosmoStat Laboratory at CEA Saclay, where he conducts his research at the intersection between cosmology and machine learning. He was a postdoctoral follow at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP) and with the Foundation of Data Analysis (FODA) institute at UC Berkeley. And before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the McWilliams Center for Cosmology at Carnegie Mellon University. He did his PhD in the CosmoStat laboratory of CEA Saclay in France.

Ilya Mandel

is a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Monash University, Australia. He is interested in gravitational-wave astronomy, stellar and binary evolution, high-energy transients, dynamics and astrostatistics. He has developed and applied inference, hierarchical modelling and machine learning tools to a range of problems from LIGO observations to paleoclimatology.

Domenico Marinucci

is a full Professor of Probability and Mathematical Statistics at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, which he directed for 8 years. He is a former ERC grantholder, a member of the Planck and Euclid missions of the European Space Agency, a collaborator of other astroparticle experiments such as PAMELA and ARGO-YBJ and the editor in chief of the Electronic Journal of Statistics. He is also an invited speaker for the European Congress of Mathematics in 2021. His research interests are mainly in the analysis of spherical random fields, with applications to Cosmic Microwave Background radiation data, see here

Alberto Krone-Martins

is a Lecturer in Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences of the University of California, Irvine, and a co-chair of the Cosmostatistics Initiative (COIN). He has been very active in developing and applying the Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics fields, particularly contributing to the discovery and study of stellar clusters and strongly lensed quasars focusing on the Gaia space mission and large sky surveys, in interfacing with industry in spacecraft navigation, in organizing summer schools and conferences, and in teaching.

Elena Sellentin

is Assistant Professor at the Mathematics Institute and Leiden Observatory at the University of Leiden, specialising in the statistical analysis of cosmological data. She has explored the challenges of gaussian and non-gaussian likelihoods, of relevance to much of cosmological survey data analysis, including improving the Hartlap correction with a principled Bayesian approach. She graduated from the University of Heidelberg, was a DAAD postdoctoral fellow at the University of Geneva and Imperial College, and is now University of Leiden faculty.

Jean-Luc Starck

is Director of Research and head of the CosmoStat laboratory at the Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe, Departement d'Astrophysique, CEA-Saclay, France. Jean-Luc Starck has a Ph.D from Nice Observatory and an Habilitation from University Paris XI. He was a visitor at the European Southern Observatory in 1993, at UCLA in 2004 and at Stanford\u2019s Department of Statistics in 2000 and 2005. Since 1994, he is a tenured researcher at CEA. In 2010 he created the CosmoStat laboratory and is strongly involved in the Euclid ESA space mission. He received the EADS prize of the French Academy of Science in 2011, the International Astrostatistics Association (IAA) Fellow Prize in 2016 and the 2018 Gruber Price in Cosmology (as member of the ESA Planck team).

Hyungsuk Tak

is an assistant professor in the departments of Statistics and Astronomy and Astrophysics at The Pennsylvania State University. He earned a Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University and was a post-doctoral fellow at SAMSI during 2016-2018, and an assistant professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include: statistical challenges in astronomical data analysis, time delay cosmography, statistical computation and Bayesian hierarchical modeling with frequency coverage evaluation.