Public Talks at the Institute of Mechanics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IMech-BAS)
As a side event to our CosmoVerseSchool@Sofia, we lead two public talks by Dr. Siyang Li , and by Prof. Denitsa Staicova from the Bulgarian Academy of Science.
https://youtu.be/XIjneKbSIIshttps://youtu.be/8JXi3n2geV0
Denitsa Staicova
Assoc. Prof. Denitsa Staicova is a researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, whose work focuses on cosmology, dark energy, and the application of machine learning techniques to astrophysical data. Her research combines statistical inference, neural networks, and observational cosmology to investigate the expansion history of the Universe and test cosmological models using Type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations, gamma-ray bursts and other astrophysical probes. She is particularly interested in physics-informed machine learning, cosmological model reconstruction, and extracting cosmological information from complex and noisy datasets. Her work sits at the intersection of cosmology, astrophysics, and data science, contributing to our understanding of the evolution of the Universe and the nature of dark energy.
Siyang Li
Siyang Li is a Brinson Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 2025 and his B.A. in Physics from the UC Berkeley. His research focuses on characterizing and refining distance indicators, including the Tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB) and J-region Asymptotic Giant Branch (JAGB), to measure extragalactic distances, constrain the Hubble constant, and investigate the Hubble tension.