Luisa Lucie-Smith

Luisa Lucie-Smith is a Junior Professor at the Hamburg Observatory, University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research focuses on cosmological structure formation, dark matter halo evolution, and applying explainable AI to interpret physical processes in the universe. She combines numerical simulations with machine learning to uncover fundamental physics.

Education: Began at Imperial College London studying gravitational wave backgrounds, completed a PhD at University College London (UCL) on cosmological machine learning applications, followed by a postdoc at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She held a four-year Research Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) before joining Hamburg in 2024 to lead her own research group.

Research Interests: Galaxy formation, large-scale structure evolution, dark matter/dark energy studies, and developing interpretable AI models to enhance astrophysical understanding. Publicly engaged in science outreach and advocating for academic diversity.

Recent Activities: Keynote talks at the University of Zurich (Oct 2024), Cosmology from Home Conference (June 2024), and Princeton IAS (Aug 2021). Active in organizing equity initiatives in academia.

Labs/Teams: Current group at Hamburg Observatory; previously part of GMGalaxies (UCL) and MPA teams. GitHub repositories include DeepHalos and machine learning tutorials.