SIMON BIRRER
Assistant Professor
Physics and Astronomy
simon.birrer@stonybrook.edu
Research Group Website | Personal Website

Biography
Birrer will start in January 2023 as an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University as a member of the Astronomy and Cosmology Group. Birrer is currently a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University (2019-2022). Before joining Stanford, Birrer was a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (2017-2019). Birrer received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2016 and did his undergraduate education (Bachelor and Master in Physics) at the same institution.

Research Statement
Simon Birrer's research focus is to probe fundamental physics on cosmological scales. Birrer and his group are primary using gravitational lensing, a phenomena described by general relativity, causing light to follow curved paths when traveling through inhomogeneous matter distributions. In the strongest regime, gravitational lensing can lead to multiple appearances of the same source and highly distorts images - know as strong gravitational lensing. Birrer’s scientific expertise is the interface between the exquisite data sets available on one side and the fundamental theory predictions on the other side. Birrer’s group is actively developing open-source advanced computational and statistical tools to extract detailed and robust information from strong lensing about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

For a detailed history, please click here for my CV.