Sydney Erickson

I'm a 3rd year PhD student in Physics, advised by Phil Marshall. I study the expansion of the universe using strong gravitational lenses. Given the growing scale and complexity of astrophysical observations, cosmological inferences using strong lensing data require advanced analysis techniques. I construct mass models for thousands of lenses using machine learning, and then combine these models in a Bayesian hierarchical inference to infer the Hubble constant. I am interested in exploring the interpretability of ML, applications of new algorithms for lens modeling, and rigorous testing of both the modeling and inference components of this pipeline to prepare for application to data from the upcoming LSST survey. Before coming to Stanford, I completed a B.S.E. in Engineering Physics at University of Michigan.