Shirley Ho

Shirley Ho is an American astrophysicist and machine learning expert, currently at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute in NYC and at the New York University and the Carnegie Mellon University. Ho also has visiting appointment at Princeton University.

A cited expert in cosmology, deep learning and its applications in astrophysics and data science, her interests include developing and deploying deep learning techniques to better understand our Universe, and other astrophysical phenomena.

She significantly contributed to the development of several fields, including: cosmic microwave background, cosmological models, dark energy, dark matter, spatial distribution of galaxies and quasars, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations,  cosmological simulations and applications of machine learning to cosmology and astrophysics.

More recently, Shirley Ho is noted for her work in leading the early adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Astrophysics. In particular, her team at Carnegie Mellon University was the first to apply 3D convolutional neural network in astrophysics, the same team then accelerated astrophysical simulations with deep learning for the first time. Her current team at Center for Computational Astrophysics and Princeton University is the first to combine symbolic regression and neural network to recover physical laws from observations directly. Her team also led the first development and deployment of deep learning accelerated simulation based inference framework for large spectroscopic surveys.

Her team further accelerated physical simulations ranging from fluid dynamics simulations to planetary dynamics simulations using modern deep learning techniques,  and developed techniques in interpretable machine learning for science.

Education
Shirley Ho graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Physics and a B.A. in Computer Science at University of California at Berkeley after completing multiple senior thesis projects in both physics and theoretical computer science in 2004. As an undergraduate, she has researched under guidance of Kam-Biu Luk in particle physics for three years, before working on weak lensing of Cosmic Microwave Background under the supervision of Uros Seljak at Princeton. She then wrote two papers in cosmology under the guidance of Martin White as a senior. Shirley Ho moved to Princeton University to pursue her Ph.D. at the Department of Astrophysical Sciences of Princeton University under the supervision of astrophysicist and cosmologist David Spergel. In 2008 she obtained her doctorate in Astrophysical Sciences, with a Thesis entitled "Baryons, Universe and Everything Else in Between".

Career
After her Ph.D., she moved to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory between 2008 and 2012, in a postdoctoral position as a Chamberlain and a Seaborg Fellow. Later on, she moved to the Carnegie Mellon University, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate (with indefinite tenure) professor in Physics. Shirley Ho was named Cooper-Siegel Development Chair Professor in 2015 at Carnegie Mellon University.

In 2016, Shirley Ho joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a Senior Scientist while being on leave from Carnegie Mellon University. In 2018, Shirley Ho joined the Simons Foundation as leader of the Cosmology X Data Science group at Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute. She also currently holds faculty positions at New York University and Carnegie Mellon University. In 2021, Shirley Ho was named the Interim Director of CCA at the Flatiron Institute in 2021.

Prizes
Shirley Ho won several prizes for her significant contributions to the fields of cosmology and astrophysics. The list includes:


 * National Blavatnik Award Finalist, 2023
 * European Physical Society Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize in cosmology 2023 (as part of SDSS/BOSS/eBOSS work)
 * NASA Group Achievement Award for contribution to Planck mission (2011) and Roman Space Telescope (2022).
 * Macronix Prize (2014): The Outstanding Young Researcher Award by International Organization of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers.
 * Carnegie Science Award (2015)
 * Elected as International Astrostatistics Association Fellow, 2020.