PhD Student

During her Master's Thesis « Impact of the distortion of time on the galaxy angular power spectrum » she worked on forecasting the signal to noise ratio for the SKA experiment by considering the observation of two different populations of galaxies (bright and faint), with the goal of testing General Relativity at large scales of the Universe, under the supervision of Prof. C. Bonvin and Sveva Castello at the University of Geneva. 

During her PhD studies, she will work on « Higher-order statistics for neutral hydrogen intensity mapping » as a member of the TITAN project.

For her PhD studies, she is using radio observations to study compact symmetric objects and supermassive black hole binaries. She is also a member of the PASIPHAE Collaboration, working on the mapping of the galactic magnetic field. Her research interests also include cosmological structure formation.

He became a member of the Institute of Astrophysics in 2022 when he started working on his senior undergraduate thesis under the supervision of Prof. Iossif Papadakis to study the X-ray variability of Active Galactic Nuclei using Swift/BAT light curves. He is currently a PhD student.

During his undergraduate and MSc studies, he studied physical models for the spectral energy distribution of accretion discs in Active Galactic Nuclei. He completed his senior thesis entitled "The energy spectrum of accretion discs in AGN" and his MSc thesis titled: “Theoretical model fits to the optical/UV spectral energy distributions of AGN” under the supervision of Prof. I. Papadakis. For his Ph.D. studies, he is working on modeling the optical/UV and X-ray variability of AGN spectra.

He worked on his Master's thesis titled "Dissecting the information content in the large-scale structures of the Universe using machine learning" under the supervision of Dr. Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro of the Flatiron Institute, New York, USA, where he investigated the scales and morphological features of the cosmic web from large-scale simulations to understand the origins of the cosmological information extracted by neural networks. For his PhD, he will be working on the topic "Morphology and Spatial Distribution of the Dust Emission using Deep Learning Methods" at FORTH with a strong collaboration with the CosmoStat Laboratory at CEA Paris-Saclay, as part of the TITAN project.

Evangelia Vaikousi completed the MSc in Astrophysics program of the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy (BCGS) in collaboration with the University of Crete, where she carried out her Master’s thesis, which concerned the study of outbursts in Galactic Be/X-ray binaries, and was performed under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Zezas. She joined the Department of Physics of the University of Crete and the Institute of Astrophysics - FORTH as a PhD student in 2023 in order to work on the understanding of the properties and the evolution of the Be/X-ray binaries.

During his undergraduate studies, he worked on Cosmic-ray phenomenology and completed his senior thesis entitled “Cosmic-ray air-shower simulations across the ankle: Combining mixed Galactic composition with new physics above 50 TeV”, under the supervision of Prof. V. Pavlidou. He also worked with Professor E. Kiritsis on a project on “Holographic RG flows on deformed 3-sphere”. For his MSc, he worked in weak-lensing cosmology, completing his MSc thesis entitled “Comparison of mass-mapping techniques using weak gravitational lensing. Application to the UNIONS galaxy survey”, under the supervision of Dr. J.L. Starck and Prof. V. Pavlidou. For his PhD studies, he is working on developing data-driven approaches for the reconstruction of weak-lensing mass maps and the analysis of large-scale datasets, including ones acquired by the Euclid satellite, as a member of the TITAN project.

In 2018, he was an intern at RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory developing interest in Radio and AGN; In 2021 he joined as a Junior Research Fellow for the UC Berkeley SETI-Amity project to do Imaging using uGMRT funded by Breakthrough Listen Initiative; In 2022 he worked as a Senior Project Associate funded by ISRO for the ISRO-ARIES Collaboration on the Aditya-L1 Project(AL1SC); Since April 2023 he is at the Institute of Astrophysics (IA-FORTH) as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr Carolina Casadio in the SMILE group.

During his undergraduate and postgraduate studies he studied the various mechanisms of galaxy activity. He developed diagnostics for galactic activity in the optical and infrared part of the spectrum, utilizing machine learning methods. He collaborates with Professor Andreas Zezas in the study of the evolution of galaxies and the application of machine learning methods in Astrophysics. In May 2022 he commenced a studentship at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University (USA).

In 2021 he was awarded with a JAE Intro SOMdM scholarship to complete his master thesis “On the inpainting of incomplete CMB sky maps” at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA). Since December 2022 he is a PhD student at the University of Crete and IA-FORTH under the supervision of Dr. Carolina Casadio.