Boris Leistedt, Ph.D.

Boris Leistedt was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2015 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University. He resigned his Fellowship in 2016 after accepting a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. He completed his Ph.D. with Hiranya Peiris at University College London. He received a master’s degree in physics from University Paris Sud (Orsay), as well as a joint master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Mons (Belgium) and Supélec (France).

Leistedt’s research is at the intersection of astrostatistics and observational cosmology: he specializes in analyzing large astronomical data sets to test pivotal questions in astrophysics and high-energy physics. During his thesis, he developed innovative methods to precisely measure the large-scale distribution of quasars. This lead to the tightest constraints on the primordial non-Gaussianity, one of the few signatures of the early universe observable in the galaxy distribution. He also showed that massive sterile neutrinos, exotic particles that could be added to the standard model, are not currently needed to explain cosmological observations. Actively involved in the Dark Energy Survey (DES), Leistedt searches for signatures of fundamental physics in the distribution of galaxies, quasars, cosmic voids and dark matter.