I'm Kate Storey-Fisher (she/her), a Kavli Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford. I am in Prof. Risa Wechsler's group, and will also collaborate with researchers across KIPAC and the university. Previously I was a postdoc at the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, working with Prof. Raúl Angulo. I completed my PhD advised by Prof. David W. Hogg at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University where I was a NASA FINESST fellow.

I study the large-scale structure of the universe—how we can use observations of galaxies and other astronomical objects to understand fundamental cosmological properties. More broadly, I’m interested in the application of data science and statistics to astrophysical problems.

I am also a writer, a public science educator, an open source advocate, a labor organizer, a half-marathoner, and an extremely dedicated member of my book club.

Research

I primarily work on developing new data science methods for large-scale structure analysis, to better constrain cosmological parameters and understand the galaxy–halo connection. You can find my publications on SAO/NASA ADS and the arXiv. These are a few of my current and recent projects:

Quaia, the Gaia-unWISE Quasar Catalog
The Gaia Milky Way mission incidentally observed 6.6 million quasar candidates! We used this sample to contruct a quasar catalog for large-scale structure cosmology, dubbed Quaia. Check out our first cosmological result with Quaia, a cross-correlation analysis with CMB lensing. More results to come! And check out this nifty animation.
Emulation of Clustering Statistics
With the Aemulus collaboration, I aim to tap into the cosmological constraining power at small scales. We use Gaussian process emulators to model galaxy clustering statistics. I investigated emulating beyond-standard statistics to further constrain the growth of structure (spoiler, we get more precise constraints!) Check out our paper.
Full-field galaxy clustering inference
I am working on generating a library of mock galaxy catalogs with the aim of performing full-field inference on the galaxy distribution, along with the BACCO group at DIPC. We are using the map2map emulator and the hybrid bias expansion for the library, and experimenting with moment networks for the inference. Stay tuned!
Anomalous Galaxies with GANs
I applied Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to detect anomalous images in the Hyper-Suprime Cam survey. We came up with a novel method for anomaly characterization, we found galaxy mergers, tidal features, extreme star-formers, and even some unexplainable objects. Read about it here, and find more https://weirdgalaxi.es yourself!
Equivariant ML for Cosmology
My collaborators have developed a new approach for enforcing physical symmetries in machine learning tasks by constructing invariant scalars from geometric objects, which greatly improves performance. We are currently applying the approach to DM halos in cosmological simulations to learn their relationship to galaxy properties.
Continuous 2-Point Function Estimation
I developed a new estimator for galaxy clustering that is continuous in galaxy separation, and any other property (binning is sinning!). It is a generalization of the 2-point correlation function using least-squares fitting. Check out the paper and the code, suave. My collaborator Abby Williams is using it to measure horizon-scale gradients.

Updates

  • September 2024: I moved to the Bay Area and started as a Kavli Fellow at KIPAC at Stanford!
  • August 2024: I wrapped up my position at DIPC—but will keep collaborating with the BACCO group!
  • June 2024: I gave the seminar at IFAE, and visited both IFAE and ICE-CSIC in Barcelona.
  • May 2024: I gave the DIPC Seminar on our work on the Quaia quasar catalog.
  • February 2024: I gave the Astro Seminar at Cardiff.
  • February 2024: I gave the Cosmology Seminar at Oxford.
  • December 2023: I gave the GRAPPA colloquium at the University of Amsterdam.
  • November 2023: I attended the IX Meeting on Fundamental Cosmology in La Laguna in the Canary Islands, and visited Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.
  • October 2023: I started my postdoc at the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) with Prof. Raúl Angulo!
  • July–August 2023: I took a much-needed post-PhD break! Highly recommend.
  • June 2023: We submitted our papers on the Quaia quasar catalog and a cosmological analysis with it!
  • May 2023: I defended my PhD and became a doctor! I am so grateful to my entire community who got me here—especially my advisor, David W. Hogg. Check out my full acknowledgements (and the rest of my thesis, if you’re so inclined) here.
  • May 2023: I was invited to give a talk at the Cosmic Connections Symposium on Astrophysics x ML at the Flatiron Institute.
  • May 2023: I attended the Cosmology with the Large-Scale structure of the Universe (CosmoLSS) workshop at the Donostia International Physics Center in Donostia–San Sebastián, Spain (my future institution!).
  • April 2023: I gave a CfA seminar at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics.

For older updates, visit this page.

Writing

I have written for Astrobites, a site by graduate students that summarizes new astrophysics research papers and dishes out other astro-focused content. I have also written for the Cooper Square Review, a publication by the NYU Journalism Institute, where I completed the Science Communication Workshops. These are a few selected pieces:

The Algorithms That Rule Your Life: "Hello World" by Hannah Fry (CSR)
Drop It Like It’s Biased: A Step-by-Step Guide to Dropping the GRE (Astrobites)
Iterative Emulation is the Sincerest Form of Parameter Estimation (Astrobites)
Morpheus, God of Dreams and Morphological Galaxy Classification (Astrobites)
Queer Figures in Astronomy History (Astrobites)
Twelve Zoom Features That Would Actually Make Academia Better (CSR)

Teaching

Courses

Pedagogy

  • Spring 2019: Design Team Leader, Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educator’s Professional Development Program (ISEE PDP). Led a team to design and teach a workshop on galaxy spectroscopy at CCA.
  • Spring 2018: Participant, ISEE PDP. Designed and taught a workshop on Bayes Theorem at CCA.

Outreach

I am involved in outreach programs and events aimed at engaging the public in science and increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields.

Science Writing Workshops
I co-led a workshop with Astrobites at AAS235 on effectively communicating science through writing, and am involved in other efforts using writing as a tool for outreach.
Skype a Scientist
I talk with classrooms of students, from 7th graders to high schoolers, about my experience as an astrophysicist via the Skype a Scientist program.
Public Talks
I give public talks on astronomy and science, to local astronomy groups and at observatories, as well as a talk at Astronomy on Tap. I have also been a guest on the comedy game show Astronaut Training at Caveat in NYC.

Service

  • I have served as a reviewer for The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), the NeurIPS Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS) workshop, the Journal of Open Source Science (JOSS), and Citizen Science: Theory and Practice (CSTP).
  • I served on the Science Organizing Committee of the special session Critical Challenges for Machine Learning in Astronomy at the European Astronomical Society meeting in June 2022.
  • I was the founding co-chair of the graduate student organization at NYU, G-PHORCE (Graduate Physics Organization for Research, Culture, and Education).
  • I co-organized the astro-ph journal club in the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics (CCPP) at NYU.
  • I was on the board of the Women in Physics (WiPhy) group at NYU.

Contact me!

Feel free to get in touch—you could open a pull request on one of my repos, or Slack me in one of the bajillion conference / collaboration workspaces I'm in, or send a constellation of satellites in front of the Mayall Telescope on Kitt Peak spelling out your message so I'll find it in the DESI data, but probably just send me an email.

kstoreyf@stanford.edu
@kstoreyf