Oliver Philcox, Ph.D.

Oliver Philcox will be joining the High Energy Theory Group at Columbia University as a postdoctoral fellow with Professors Lam Hui and Colin Hill. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, under the supervision of Professors David Spergel and Matias Zaldarriaga, and is a visiting student at the Institute for Advanced Study. Previously, Oliver earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Cambridge and spent a year as a predoctoral student in Harvard University under Professor Daniel Eisenstein.

Oliver has written papers on a wide variety of topics within theoretical and experimental cosmology and has recently been focusing on questions relating to the extraction of cosmological information from modern galaxy surveys. As part of his thesis, he has developed new ways to characterize the statistical distribution of galaxies, such as via the configuration of randomly selected triplets and quadruplets of objects. Combining mathematical estimators for such quantities with robust theoretical models, he has obtained sharp constraints on a number of physical models, for example probing the physics of inflation, constraining the cosmic expansion rate, and testing the Universe’s symmetry under parity transformations. At Columbia, Oliver plans to further develop new tools for analyzing cosmological data sets, both from galaxy surveys and beyond, with an emphasis on probing new physics in the early and late universe.