Bridging Observation and Theory in the Age of Big Data Astronomy

Mark Krumholz completed his PhD at University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and then held a Hubble Fellowship at Princeton from 2005-2008. He joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2008, serving as assistant and then associate professor, before moving The Australian National University as a professor in 2015, where he has remained since. His research interests are in theory of star formation and the interstellar medium, and numerical methods for large-scale simulations.

Melissa Ness is an electrical engineer who moved "late" in life to astronomy research and has since had the opportunity to work at the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Heidelberg, at Columbia University and the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, and now The Australian National University in Canberra. She uses large survey data to reverse-engineer the formation history of the Milky Way Galaxy, and is particularly interested in developing data-driven machine learning approaches to extract information from stellar spectra.

Connor is a Forrest Fellow at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at UWA. He completed his PhD in Canada at the University of Victoria. From 2020-2023 he was a Kavli Fellow at the University of Tokyo's Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU). His research focuses on applying AI to large data sets from modern telescopes and galaxy simulations to test models for baryonic and dark matter physics.

Prof. Taylor is an extragalactic astronomer and sometimes cosmologist who maps galaxy demographics and the galaxy–halo connection in the relatively nearby Universe. He co-leads (with Michelle Cluver) the 4MOST Hemisphere Survey; a project to obtain spectra and redshifts for approx. 4 million galaxies across the full southern hemisphere to obtain the best possible description of galaxies at z < 0.15. His other main research activity is pioneering novel experimental designs to detect and measure the dark matter halos that surround galaxies via the effect of gravitational lensing.

Dr Yuxiang Qin is currently an ARC DECRA Fellow at the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Australian National University. His research interests are in high-redshift galaxy formation, reionization, 21-cm cosmology, and their synergies with fundamental dark matter physics. Dr Qin integrates numerical simulations, Bayesian inference frameworks, and machine learning techniques to interpret high-redshift observations and evaluate the scientific potential of future instruments such as the Square Kilometre Array. He was awarded a PhD in astrophysics by the University of Melbourne in 2018.

George Heald is the Lead Commissioning Scientist for the SKA-Low telescope, which is currently under construction in Western Australia. He received his PhD in 2006 at the University of New Mexico. He worked for a decade at ASTRON in the Netherlands, then moved to Australia in 2016 to work at CSIRO, eventually leading the ATNF Science program. He moved to the SKA Observatory in 2024. His research interests include neutral hydrogen in galaxies, cosmic magnetism, and “making radio telescopes work”.

Dr. Rajika Kuruwita returned to the Australian National University as a Postdoc, 7 years after she got her PhD there in 2019. During her time away she was an EU Interactions Fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, and then she was the first HITS Independent Postdoc at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies. Her work uses 3D Magnetohydrodynamical simulations to model the formation of binary and multiple star systems from cluster scales down to circumstellar discs. She likes to look at how early interactions between stars could help, or hinder planet formation.