I am a DPhil candidate in Astrophysics at the University of Oxford (Balliol College), supervised by Harry Desmond, Julien Devriendt, and Adrianne Slyz. I specialise in Bayesian forward modelling of astrophysical observations and digital twins of the local Universe, leveraging galaxy clustering and peculiar velocities to infer the initial conditions of the Universe. Lately, I have been deriving novel statistical frameworks for measuring the expansion rate, ranging from Milky Way stars to nearby Cepheid, tip of the red giant branch (TRGB), and maser host galaxies, all the way to distant supernovae – though the latter remain a challenge due to their complex selection effects.

Beyond this, I am broadly interested in galaxy formation and semi-analytic modelling, cosmological rescaling techniques for dark matter simulations, forward modelling the cosmic microwave background, and pursuing novel applications of machine learning in astrophysics and cosmology.

Brief background

Before Oxford, I completed my M.Sc. in Physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, with my thesis on strong-field lensing of gravitational waves externally supervised by Miguel Zumalacárregui and Marius Oancea, and my B.Sc. in Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Glasgow, which included a year-long exchange at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. At Glasgow, I worked with John Veitch and Chris Messenger on gravitational-wave data analysis.

While at Oxford, I held a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute in New York working with Shy Genel and Lucia A. Perez, and was a visiting researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris working with Guilhem Lavaux.

Contact

I am always happy to chat about research, potential collaborations, or just science in general – feel free to drop me an email at richard.stiskalek@physics.ox.ac.uk.