ESP Biography

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I grew up in England, asking questions about the Universe from the age of about 4 and not stopping - luckily my father was a science teacher! Physics got really fun aged 16, when we started applying the stuff we had learned in maths lessons to the real world - so I went and carried on playing with it at Cambridge for a physics degree, and like the problem sets there so much that I stayed on to do a PhD. While trying to make the best use of data from both radio telescopes and optical telescopes to understand clusters of galaxies I learnt about how probability works, and how Bayesian statistics mirrors the scientific method. Bayesian analysis was new enough and exciting enough for me to get hired by Stanford in 2003, where I helped get KIPAC started. I'm now back there, after 3 years in Santa Barbara using the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Keck Observatory on Hawaii, to make accurate measurements of galaxies using the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. If you have never looked through a gravitational lens, you really should.

Past Classes