RESEARCH:

Georgios Valogiannis is a cosmologist whose research focuses on the development and implementation of analytical and computational approaches to fully leverage upcoming large scale survey data and decipher the properties of physical theories underlying critical open questions in cosmology. These include the nature of the accelerated expansion of the universe, dark matter, massive neutrinos, the physics of the early universe and the properties of gravity at large scales. Valogiannis’ research also involves active collaborative engagement and leadership activities in two key cosmological surveys: the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time Dark Energy Science Collaboration (LSST DESC).

Despite the tremendous promise held by these ambitious observational endeavors in the era of precision cosmology, a full exploitation of the information encoded in the 3-dimensional cosmic web is highly nontrivial. Motivated by this challenge, Valogiannis’ latest research has been focused on the development and application of novel estimators that enable an efficient and reliable extraction of the non-Gaussian cosmological information that lies beyond the standard power spectrum. Such an approach has been, for instance, the wavelet scattering transform.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undoubtedly made inroads in precision cosmology. As a Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, Valogiannis plans to develop a research agenda that will be focused on identifying novel pathways through which AI can allow researchers to fully exploit the tremendous information that is encoded in the large-scale structure of the universe, in combination with data from the next generation of cosmic galaxy surveys.

BIO:

Starting from September 2023, Georgia’s Valogiannis is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Before coming to Chicago, Valogiannis was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Physics at Harvard University, working in Prof. Cora Dvorkin’s group. Prior to that, Valogiannis obtained a PhD in the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University in 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Rachel Bean.