Daisuke Nagai is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University. He is also the Director of Graduate Studies in Yale Physics Department. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2005. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2008, he was a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. His work has been supported by NASA, NSF and Research Corporation and recognized with numerous awards. He has also served as one of the founding co-directors of the Yale Center for Research Computing, the Chair of Physics and Data Science Task Force at Yale Physics Department, and a member of the university-wide Data Science Advisory Committee at Yale University.

What do you do with data science?

Nagai’s research lab works on computational and data-driven cosmology and astrophysics – one of the most ambitious and exciting research areas in modern science, fueled by recent advances concerning the origin, composition, and structure of the universe. Today, the cosmology and astrophysics field is now poised to enter into a new “big data” era, with enormous surveys planned for the coming decade, on top of extensive multi-wavelength archives that have only begun to be exploited. These data require novel and emerging computational, mathematical and data science techniques (especially machine learning). Nagai’s research group develops and uses theoretical and computational models of how galaxies and clusters of galaxies form and grow in the Universe starting from the Big Bang to today. Specific projects involve applying machine-learning techniques to large simulation and/or observational datasets to model the structure evolution of galaxy clusters with the goal of unraveling the nature of dark matter and dark energy using multi-wavelength astronomical surveys.