meet a DESI member

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University and fairly new in DESI. I collaborate on projects in the Galaxy & QSO working group.

Where were you born?
I was born and raised at a harbor city called Kaohsiung in Taiwan.

Where do you live now?
I live in Durham, United Kingdom where I work as postdoc at the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University.

What do you do as part of DESI?
As a new member, I have not been involved with many projects yet. I just recently get involved with a project on the detection and characterization of absorption features in QSO spectra using visual inspection and machine learning techniques.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
As an academic, our job is not just research. There are also many other works involved such as teaching, supervision, observation, meeting organizing, etc. Each of them attracts me for different reasons. For example, I found it’s really rewarding to support students and see their growth.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Searching for your science questions, as it is the best motivation when feeling lost during this journey.

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy doing all kinds of sports and video games. In particular, I love volleyball and was playing in a team for many years. I also enjoy being a backpacker traveling to many places. Sometimes, I’d listen to music while walking and daydreaming, and it feels great.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I have been strongly fascinated by three mysterious things—Universe, history, and ocean—since I was a kid. If I were not an astrophysicist, I’d probably become either an archaeologist or an oceanographer.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
DESI (will) produces over millions of quasar (QSO) spectra. This huge amount of data can not only provide a great constraint to cosmological parameters as well as be used to investigate the environmental impact in galaxy evolution and formation.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I work in the DESI lensing topical group and I co-chair the DESI-II working group.

Where were you born?
Australia

Where do you live now?
Santa Cruz, California

What do you do as part of DESI?
My DESI work focuses on two things. First, together with the DESI lensing group, I am working on getting cosmological constraints for the Y1 data using galaxy clustering and galaxy lensing. Second, I am working in the DESI-II working group where we think about what science projects we could carry out after the end of the DESI 5 year survey.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
Learning about new things everyday. I love knowing that there is still so much to discover.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
During your PhD, and postdoc years, it is important to specialize, and to “dig deep”. But after, don’t forget to also look around and see what else is going on. Try going to some talks in other departments and in other fields. Don’t ignore the bigger picture of the world in which we live.

What do you do for fun?
Activities with my kids, swimming, and gardening.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I would be a permaculture farmer.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
The fact that we have so much data! I did my PhD on a survey that was 2 square degrees, so I still marvel at how much data we have with DESI.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I’m the co-lead of the “DESI CMB cross correlation” topical group within the Clusters, Cosmology, and Cross-Correlation working group. I work on thinking about the relationship between DESI galaxies and the cosmic microwave background–the oldest light in the universe, which can be gravitationally lensed, scattered, Doppler-shifted, and gravitationally-redshifted by galaxies, their host dark matter halos, and the hot gas inside them.

Where were you born?
I was born in New York City and grew up in Irvine, California.

Where do you live now?
I live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, just outside of the Toronto metro area. I’m a postdoc at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics and the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics.

What do you do as part of DESI?
Mainly, I think about how we can learn about cosmology from DESI galaxies and quasars gravitationally lensing the cosmic microwave background. Lately, I’ve been working on using the gravitational lensing of the CMB by DESI quasars as a clean probe of the largest scales of the Universe, where certain models for inflation can generate strong large-scale correlations. I’ve also worked on studying redshift failures and identifying bad fibers within the LSS Catalog/KP3 working group, and am involved in the DESI-weak lensing cross-correlations project.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
Contributing to our scientific understanding of the cosmos. I enjoy the thought that our work today might help people in the future understand the universe better. Or it may not—that’s the nature of science! At the least, any paper adds (even if only very incrementally) to our vast corpus of knowledge of physics.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Always try to maintain a skeptical attitude towards your own research work. There’s no answer key in research, so you always have to come up with tests to make sure that what you’re doing is correct!

What do you do for fun?
Running, hiking, following baseball, and classical music.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I like exploring landscapes, so maybe something with maps or geography.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
40 million galaxy spectra! The operations of DESI have gone so well (observing running months ahead of schedule despite the Contreras Fire), so I feel like that sets the standard for the rest of the collaboration.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am the manager of the DESI focal plane system, consisting of 5000 fiber-positioning robots and 10 cameras for guiding and focusing the telescope.

Where were you born?
I was born in Cambridge, England, and spent my early years in Bristol, Leeds and London, all in the UK, as well as Iran and Mexico. I went to high school and university in Toronto, Canada.

Where do you live now?
I came to California for graduate school, spent five years in France at CERN, then returned to California for a postdoc and faculty position. I now live in Irvine, which is just south of Los Angeles.

What do you do as part of DESI?
Each morning, I check on the 5000 robots to look for any problems during the night. The focal plane is a unique and central part of the DESI instrument, so I work on outreach materials to share the excitement with my collaborators and the public, including a poster, animations and 3D-printed models. I also work with my students at UC Irvine to better understand our quasar sample and Lyman-alpha forest absorption, and look for novel ways to apply machine learning methods.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
A large survey like DESI offers such a great variety of interesting topics to work on, from instrumentation and operations to simulation and cosmological inference. I am excited to learn new skills every day, working with my students, in diverse areas such as electronics, statistics, machine learning, and visualization.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Doing science isn’t only about publishing papers. Take advantage of the many opportunities to learn new skills and don’t be afraid to explore new avenues and change directions a few times in your career.

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy cooking and eating good food, building things, taking photos, and being active (especially running, soccer, and pickleball).

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
A sheep farmer in the Shetland Islands.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
My collaborators. Although the DESI collaboration probably feels large to many of us, it is one of the smaller groups I have worked with, and we have an amazing team.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a PhD candidate at the University of Utah primarily involved with Lyman-alpha forest cosmology studies.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?
I am from Omaha, Nebraska, and I now live in Salt Lake City, Utah. SLC is easily the most incredible and beautiful place I have ever lived!

What do you do as part of DESI?
I work on developing spectroscopic models for the quasars observed by DESI. These models will help us maximize the cosmological information we can extract from the quasar sample.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
The potential for DESI to discover things that no one was expecting or looking for.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
In the words of Alie Ward: “ask smart people stupid questions”. Because in reality, there are no stupid questions. Never let anyone discourage your curiosity.<

What do you do for fun?
I try to spend as much time as I can outdoors: hiking, long camping trips, skiing, roller skating, and any sort of wildlife watching. I also love communicating science to the public. I host Astronomy on Tap in Salt Lake City, am a science communicator with the Natural History Museum of Utah, and volunteer at the local zoo. Finally, I have 3 perfect cats who command the remainder of my time.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
A wildlife or park ranger… maybe in Alaska 🙂

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I have worked as a co-lead of the galaxy and quasar clustering working group in the past. Right now, I don’t have official managerial positions. I am supervising my students’ research and trying to figure out how to extract cosmology with higher-order clustering.

Where were you born?
I was born in the Black Sea port of Sokhumi in Georgia (the country).

Where do you live now?
I live in Manhattan, Kansas, USA

What do you do as part of DESI?
I am trying to come up with new ways of analyzing the clustering of DESI galaxies. Two directions that interest me right now are the usage of higher-order statistics and small (nonlinear) scales for cosmology. Both are very promising in terms of potential scientific yield but the methodology for dealing with them is currently not fully developed.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
The most exciting part of my job is that I spend quite a lot of it trying to solve mathematical puzzles, something I would be willing to do for free. Another part of my job is teaching young scientists physics and math, also something that I really enjoy.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
When you are an undergraduate student you succeed by doing well what other people tell you to do (i.e. solving homework problems, preparing well for the test, etc.). As soon as you become a Ph.D. student, you have to realize that your professional development is now completely up to you. Take the initiative, identify things that you need in your career but don’t know well (programming? applied statistics?), and learn them. Choose research projects that you feel passionate about and work hard on completing them. Your supervisors and senior peers will be glad to advise you and help you along but you must be the one in the driver’s seat.

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy playing chess and reading history books.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
If I weren’t a scientist I would probably end up being a teacher or a librarian. Or I may have chosen a career that utilizes math, e.g. actuary or an accountant.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
What excites me most about DESI is the opportunity to work alongside the brightest minds in my field. I enjoy going to the collaboration meetings, asking questions, and coming back with the research ideas.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a PhD student working in the galaxy clustering group, where I work on generating high-fidelity mocks for DESI QSOs and studying their halo occupation distribution. I also take shifts as a Support Observer for DESI. 

Where were you born?
I was born in New Delhi, India, but I have my roots in the South Indian state of Kerala, one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. 

Where do you live now?
After my undergraduate studies in India, I moved to Texas, USA, to pursue my PhD at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. 

What do you do as part of DESI?
I work on probing the cosmic expansion of our Universe by studying how the large-scale structures are clustered. In DESI, I work on QSOs to generate high-fidelity mocks using the subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) technique, with the help of UCHUU simulations. I study two-point correlation statistics of this clustering and also find their halo occupation distribution (HOD). Twice a semester, I also take shifts as a Support Observer for DESI where I am in charge of afternoon calibrations and data quality assessment. 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job? 
I have always wanted to study why the Universe is the way it is. Despite being just a speck of dust in the vastness of this universe, Astrophysics helps us to study the grandest events to ever have happened. 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Don’t give up on your dreams, and be ready to accept failures along with success. Curiosity, Commitment, and Patience are your best friends in research life. Take lots of notes, and When in doubt—always follow your notes. 

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy playing table tennis, tennis, and cricket. I also enjoy watching them in my free time. I am a huge Potterhead and Lord of the Rings fan, so you can discuss anything from the Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings world if you meet me. I also occasionally write poetry.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
If not a scientist, I would have been a poet or a cricketer. 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
This job of being a beginner-level researcher with DESI provides me with an opportunity to realize my dreams of understanding the cosmos. The best part is the chance to collaborate with the greatest minds out there in this field. I get to interact with experts in theory, computation, and instrumentation. I get to learn new and interesting discoveries after attending each group meeting.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I coordinate the working group that will produce the Alcock-Paczyanski and Redshift Space Distortion measurements from the clustering of galaxies and quasars of the year 1 data release. Thanks to the effort of this group, and in coordination with other working groups, the DESI team will be able to place cosmological constraints such as the amount of matter in the Universe or infer how fast the Universe is expanding today.

Where were you born?
I was born in Barcelona.

Where do you live now?
After 6 years abroad I returned to Barcelona, where I now live and work.

What do you do as part of DESI?
I have many duties within DESI. Just a few examples, I organize weekly calls that help to coordinate the activities of the different groups working on similar topics. Along with close collaborators, I have also designed the blinding strategy for DESI, which will help us to perform an analysis free of human confirmation bias. I have also worked on new compression techniques that will allow a lossless compression, from the DESI catalog, which consists of 3D positions of millions of galaxies, down to a few parameters of interest, which can be interpreted in the light of different cosmological models. Such compression will greatly help the analysis and interpretation of DESI data.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
Working with real data that no one has ever looked at or analyzed before! We just don’t know what the Universe will tell us when we complete DESI observations, and the moment we disclose that information and learn about new things is very exciting.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
I would say “follow your dream” and try to do what you like. Be curious, science is 90% hard work, but also 10% creativity. I’d say that a person that can be both hard worker and creative will definitely be a good scientist. 

What do you do for fun?
I love being outside doing sports in contact with nature. I enjoy riding my bikes a lot (both road and mountain bike) and organizing bikepacking adventures with my friends.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a member of DESI along with my graduate students and postdoc. In the past I have enjoyed helping out in a few different service roles in DESI such as publications board and co-chairing the C3 working group.

Where were you born?
I was born in a small town on the coast in Connecticut.

Where do you live now?
Now I live in Florida, where I am a professor at the University of Florida—which is farther from the beach than you’d think!

What do you do as part of DESI?
My group and I work on pushing forward 3-point correlation function and higher-order statistics to help us tighten our cosmological constraints as well as explore new physics during inflation like primordial non-Gaussianity and parity violation. I’m also part of an exciting secondary target project to get redshifts for WISE objects to improve the cross-correlation studies one can do with WISE and the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I enjoy the idea that we can actually increase our knowledge of what the fundamental nature of reality is, both with studies aimed at understanding dark energy on a deeper level, and studies aimed at the very beginning of the Universe (inflation). Hibert said at some math congress in the early 1900s that “We must know; we will know” and I have always liked that phrase. it both conveys that fuller understanding of reality is an imperative, and an achievable imperative (so, it is optimistic).

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Nietzsche wrote somewhere “Become who you are, but not too early.” I think that’s good advice. Ultimately, I suspect that whatever original thing one is going to do in science will come out of pursuing one’s own particular, unique interests, in one’s own way, because that’s the only way to do something that everyone else isn’t already doing. So that’s how I see the first part. But I also think you shouldn’t restrict yourself too early based on “who you think you are” as a scientist. For instance, while probably what I enjoy the most is finding new mathematical ways to deal with problems, the work I’ve done that maybe has had the most impact actually came from developing algorithms. Recently I’ve gone as far as you can go from pen and paper and been trying to use Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for cosmology. If I’d believed “who I am as a scientist” was just “pen and paper”, I would have closed myself off from that latter opportunity.

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy classical music a lot (both going to the symphony and playing the viola) and also watching English detective shows.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
Probably being a classical musician, maybe one of the few careers even harder to find a permanent job in than academia. I also think I’d enjoy being an antiques dealer, but I’d have trouble ever parting with anything to sell it.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
The people! Covid really brought home to me that having a community to learn from and interact with is an essential ingredient that makes science much more fun. It has been really interesting to go from being a graduate student in DESI to a postdoc to a faculty member, and I think that’s been a great opportunity to get to know people in pretty much every seniority layer of DESI on their own terms.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I’m a postdoc at Berkeley Lab since 2019. I have been involved in DESI since 2016 while I was a graduate student at University of Pittsburgh. I have worked on various aspects of DESI, including target selection, survey operations, and the DESI imaging surveys. I enjoy working on the interface between observation and theory, turning the data from the telescope into data and measurements that theorists can compare their models against. The day-to-day work involves a lot of programming, sometimes detective work to figure out what is causing issues in the data, and occasionally writing up the work into papers.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
While working on the DESI imaging surveys, I would often examine the data quality by scrolling over images in the Legacy Surveys Viewer, and I’m always fascinated by how vast and beautiful our universe is. And I’m still amazed by the fact that, by mapping out these tiny (and seemingly random and chaotic) blobs of light on the night sky, we are learning something fundamental about our universe. And just as gratifying is being able to work with and learn from this great team of people that are so knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and kind.

Where were you born? And where do you live now?
I was born and grew up in Chongqing, China, also known as the “mountain city” and “city of fog” and was China’s provisional capital during WWII. It’s famous for its “mala” (literally numbing and spicy) food such as the hot pot. I went to school in Chongqing and the neighboring city of Chengdu, before coming to the US for my PhD degree. I currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy hiking, cycling, swimming, tennis, badminton, reading, cooking, listening to podcasts, learning new things on youtube, and casual photography.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
It’s hard to imagine not being an academic of some sort. But if I were not a physicist, a few interesting careers come to mind, in no particular order: biologist/geneticist, geologist, historian, or economist.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Do what you love. One of the best decisions in my life is switching to doing astronomy in the middle of graduate school when I knew barely anything about astronomy or cosmology, and turning a hobby (amateur astronomy) into a career.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am postdoc researcher in the DESI C3 and clustering working groups.

Where were you born?
China

Where do you live now?
South Korea

What do you do as part of DESI?
Cosmology, larger-scale-structure, peculiar velocities, HOD, and mock sampling algorithms.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I developed a new HOD model for HI galaxies. I also expect this model can be used to model DESI emission line galaxies (ELGs).

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Have a global perspective.

What do you do for fun?
Video games.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
Travel around the world.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
DESI providing a larger working group and data set for my research.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Kansas State University. Working closely with the Galaxy and Quasar Clustering, Target Selection, and Imaging Validation working groups, my role has centered around the characterization of observational systematic effects since 2016.

Where were you born and where do you live now?
I was born in Hamaden, a city in the midwest part of Iran. I spent a few years away from home for college, before coming to the states to pursue a PhD degree in Physics at Ohio University. I live in Columbus, Ohio now.

What do you do as part of DESI?
I develop methods and codes based on statistics and machine learning to remove the effects of observational systematics, such as those caused by Milky Way extinction. The objective is to enable robust and unbiased measurements of cosmological parameters.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
The most interesting aspect about my job is that I get to collaborate with so many talented scientists from all over the world, and this opportunity has enhanced the caliber of my research in many ways.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Learn computer programming and never be afraid to sign yourself up for new challenges; presentations, observations, or public outreach.

What do you do for fun?
I do love cooking for myself, playing pool with friends. I also like racing but unfortunately, I cannot afford a super car at the moment.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
As a kid, I was curious about the mechanics of automobiles. I even considered choosing Mechanical Engineering as my major in College. If I had not pursued physics, I would have loved to become a mechanic, like Carrol Shelby, building an engine.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
DESI is one-of-a-kind collaboration which is going to revolutionize modern cosmology in the 2020s. I am really excited about the massive amount of data and all the science that DESI provides and enables.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am part of the lead author group preparing the C3 lensing mock challenge, and in particular, I am leading the effort to calibrate the source redshift distribution of the weak lensing catalogues using the technique of “clustering redshifts”.

Where were you born?
I was born in Italy, in the snowy Alps. I then moved to Milan when I was 10 years old.

Where do you live now?
In 2018 I moved to Australia, and I now live between Melbourne and Brisbane.

What do you do as part of DESI?
My research goal is to investigate possible modifications to the current theory of gravity (General Relativity). From an observational viewpoint, these modifications can be tested by measuring the relative effect of gravity on light (that is, on relativistic particles) and on matter (that is, on galaxy positions). My plan is to combine the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies mapped by DESI with the weak lensing measurements provided by surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES).

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
There are different aspects I enjoy of my job. In general, I love spending time learning new skills and deepening my knowledge on various topics.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Be curious and find good mentors!

What do you do for fun?
I am a very active person. I love the ocean and the mountains. I enjoy surfing, hiking, op-shopping, visiting art galleries and baking. I miss the snow very much. I started skiing when I was two years old and won my first gold medal at the age of six.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I always wanted to be a journalist or a writer. I love art and literature, especially Italian literature. When I was 17 I started working for a local newspaper, but then quit to study physics two years later.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
At the moment, I am very excited to see what dark questions we will be answering with the upcoming DESI data!

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a member of the Data Management team with primary responsibility for data transfer and archiving.  This includes the transfer of raw data from Kitt Peak to NERSC, as well as transfers and backups of reduced data.

Where were you born?
Dayton, Ohio, USA.

Where do you live now?
Tucson, Arizona, USA.

What do you do as part of DESI?
The role of data archiving requires very careful thought about how data will be accessed and used by the collaboration and the general public. In order to maximize utility and minimize potential confusion, strict quality standards need to be applied to data, code and documentation.  Many of these quality standards can be enforced by automation, and I also advise other collaborators on simple ways they can ensure quality from the outset.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I would say on-mountain observing, but that hasn’t been possible for a very long time.  That’s unfortunate because the experience of actually working at (in?) a telescope is valuable as well as exciting. Another interesting aspect is following developments in the wider fields of supercomputing, storage, programming and other advanced information technology fields, and sharing that experience with NOIRLab and DESI.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Travel. The current state of affairs is just a phase, and society will realize the importance of travel again. For now, pay for it yourself if you have to, but get out there into the whole world. You can’t taste the food over Zoom.

What do you do for fun?
Hiking, biking, reading, running, enjoying the cuisine of Tucson, a World City of Gastronomy.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
Cocktail mixologist.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
DESI is building on the success of a great team of scientists and engineers, many of whom worked for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). It is always a privilege and a pleasant experience to continue working with this team. Considering the astonishing breadth of results from SDSS, the scientific possibilities of DESI are mind-blowing.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am currently a co-convener of the DESI Year 1 BAO Key Project.

Where were you born?
Busan, South Korea

Where do you live now?
I live in Athens, Ohio, a small college town. This year, though, I am living in Berkeley, California, for my sabbatical leave. I am super excited.

What do you do as part of DESI?
My postdocs, students, and I are members of the galaxy—quasar clustering working group and our focus is on how to better reconstruct the cosmological information in the distribution of the galaxies, part of which has been lost during the evolution of the Universe for the last 13.8 billion years. We are also working on how to best clean up the observational systematics from the data using a deep learning method.

As a co-convener of the Year 1 BAO Key project (aka Key Project 4), I and many KP4 participants together are working on robustly deriving the DESI Year 1 BAO measurement. We expect the first year DESI data alone to produce the best BAO measurement to date, and therefore it requires a much more stringent systematic control than has been ever done.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
What can be more exciting than learning about our Universe? 🙂

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Do what you like the most (but I am 99.99% sure that whoever reading this already like astrophysics very much). And the postdoc time is the best time (so, keep swimming).

What do you do for fun?
Learning new things such as piano, kick-boxing, and ballet.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
This job was my dream job. My alternative dream job was a cartoonist (I had good talent on this, except that I could not redraw the same character more than once).

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
This is the best galaxy survey data today and also I very much appreciate and enjoy the collaborative environment of DESI. Working with people across the world to solve a common question brings you some exciting moments from time to time.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
After co-chairing the Lyman alpha WG for several years, I am now co-convener of Key Project 6. We plan to measure BAO above redshift 2 from the correlations of the Lyman alpha forest, and its cross-correlation with the quasars themselves.

Where were you born?
I was born in Barcelona.

Where do you live now?
Finally, I am back to Barcelona after 9 years of wandering around the globe.

What do you do as part of DESI?
Besides coordinating the BAO measurement of KP6, I like to study the distribution of matter on Megaparsec scales using the Lyman alpha forest, and compare the measurements to hydrodynamical simulations.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I like working on puzzles, like a difficult Sudoku or the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Being a scientist is fun, but there are other cool jobs out there. So give it a good shot, but don’t get too obsessed about it.

What do you do for fun?
I like playing sports (climbing, tennis, football) and I love trying new food and beers.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I’d like to understand the chemistry of cooking. I know, I’d still be a scientist, but a very different one!

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
I like being part of a large collaboration, seeing lots of creative people working together to achieve these very complex and exciting measurements.