Chun-Hao To
Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow
RESEARCH:
Chun-Hao To is a cosmologist who maps the sky and pieces together the story of the universe to understand the underlying fundamental principles. He uses optical data, such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and simulations to precisely measure the amplitude of the large-scale structure of the universe and its time evolution. Specifically, he leads the joint cosmological analysis of galaxy cluster abundances, galaxy clustering, and weak lensing in DES where he contributes significantly to data analyses, simulations, theories, and statistical inference, in addition to his leadership role as a working group co-convenor. Besides DES, he is also involved in the Roman High Latitude Imaging Survey (HLIS) Project Infrastructure Team (PIT) on developing the weak lensing analysis pipeline for NASA’s Roman telescope. Chun-Hao’s past and ongoing research has already incorporated AI techniques to accelerate statistical inferences and to infer galaxies’ redshifts from galaxy colors. As a Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, Chun-Hao plans to expand the use of AI for survey data analyses and cross-correlations with overlapping Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) surveys. Specifically, he plans to use AI to improve the fidelity of fast cosmological simulations, to obtain accurate redshift estimations based on incomplete training data, and to perform joint analyses of clusters found in CMB surveys and gravitational lensing measurements in imaging surveys.
BIO:
Starting from September 2024, Chun-Hao To is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Before joining UChicago, Chun-Hao was a CCAPP Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ohio State University (OSU). Prior to OSU, he obtained his PhD at the Physics Department at Stanford University in 2021 and his Bachelor’s degree at the Physics Department at National Taiwan University in 2015.