CosmoCoffee

[Sarah Bridle]

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London recently appointed two new cosmology faculty Hiranya Peiris and Filipe Abdalla, in addition to existing cosmology faculty Ofer Lahav and myself. Please encourage excellent potential students to apply for PhD studentships. Application information is here http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~sv/PhDadmissions The deadline is 12 Feb 2010 for candidates eligible for STFC funding (i.e., candidates from the UK, or meeting residency requirements), or 2 Feb for overseas candidates seeking scholarships.

This year we are additionally advertising a four year interdisciplinary PhD studentship in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) at University College London (UCL), to start October 2010.

The successful applicant will work in the area of gravitational cosmic shear, with an emphasis on new interdisciplinary approaches to the measurement of gravitational shear from images (e.g. GREAT08, GREAT10 and beyond) in collaboration with computer scientists, including UCL's Center for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) directed by Prof. John Shawe-Taylor. A background in gravitational lensing is not essential but candidates should have studied cosmology, computer science and/or statistical analysis. This is part of the five year Capitalising on Gravitational Shear (COGS) programme funded by the European Research Council (ERC), for which we are also in the process of appointing two postdoctoral positions. There is potential to apply the techniques developed to data including that from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and simulations for the proposed Euclid ESA satellite.

Informal enquiries can be made to Dr Sarah Bridle (sarah@star.ucl.ac.uk), Prof. John Shawe-Taylor (jst@cs.ucl.ac.uk), Prof. Ofer Lahav (lahav@star.ucl.ac.uk) or Dr Filipe Abdalla (fba@star.ucl.ac.uk).

Application information is also here: http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~sv/PhDadmissions (for the COGS studentship the STFC requirements on residency do not apply and a scholarship is not required; the deadline is 12 Feb).

[Sarah Bridle]

To clarify the situation about residency: UCL fees are much larger for non-EU students than EU students and the budget can only cover the EU fee level. However this could be used towards the fees of a non-EU student. This would leave a shortfall of almost 15 000 pounds per year which would have to come from elsewhere. Sorry about this.