Rafael da Silva de Souza

Holds a degree in Astronomy from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2004) and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of São Paulo (2009). Completed postdoctoral research at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, Japan (2010-2011), at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), South Korea (2012-2014), and at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary (2014-2016). From 2017 to 2020, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina, USA, and between 2020 and 2022, he served as an Associate Professor at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, China. Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, and chair of the Cosmostatistics Initiative (COIN).He has received various awards and recognitions, including the Excellence in Research award from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (2022) and the Prose Award for the Best Book in Cosmology and Astronomy (2018). He was also awarded the Marie-Curie Fellowship by the AstroFit program (2017) and the International Astrostatistics Association Award (2016) for his work in Astrostatistics.His academic and scientific activities focus on extragalactic astrophysics, with an emphasis on galaxy evolution and extragalactic stellar systems. He works at the interface between statistics, machine learning, and astrophysics, developing and applying techniques such as Hierarchical Bayesian Models, supervised and unsupervised learning, neural networks, and likelihood-free inference models. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)