DISCOVER Mini-Symposium

Join us for the DISCOVER (Diversity and Innovation in Scientific Computing: Opportunities for Valuing Exploration and Representation) mini-symposium series, where we celebrate the power of diversity and innovation in computational science and engineering. In this mini-symposium series, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about the groundbreaking research of scientists from underrepresented groups. Moreover, you’ll be able to ask questions and discover more about the experiences and challenges of researchers from underrepresented groups in various stages of their research careers.
Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to learn, connect, and be inspired!

Bio: Katrin Heitmann is the deputy director of Argonne’s High Energy Physics division, and a physicist and computational scientist. She is also a Senior Associate for the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and a member of NAISE at Northwestern. Before joining Argonne, Katrin was a staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her research currently focuses on computational cosmology, in particular on trying to understand the causes for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. She is responsible for large simulation campaigns with HACC and for the tools in the associated analysis library, CosmoTools. Katrin is a member of several major astrophysical surveys that aim to shed light on this question and is the currently the Spokesperson for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

Exploring the Dark Universe 

Cosmology — the study of the origin, evolution, and constituents of the Universe — is now entering one of its most scientifically exciting phases. Three decades of surveying the sky have culminated in the celebrated “Cosmological Standard Model”. Yet, two of its key pillars, dark matter and dark energy — together accounting for 95% of the mass-energy of the Universe — remain mysterious. Next-generation observatories will open new routes to understand the true nature of the “Dark Universe”. These observations will pose tremendous challenges on many fronts — from the sheer size of the data that will be collected to its modeling and interpretation. The interpretation of the data requires sophisticated simulations on the world’s largest supercomputers. The cost of these simulations, the uncertainties in our modeling abilities, and the fact that we have only one Universe that we can observe opposed to carrying out controlled experiments, all come together to create a major test for statistical methods of data analysis. In this talk I will give a brief introduction to the Dark Universe and outline the challenges ahead. I will describe how complex, large-scale simulations will be used to extract the cosmological information from ongoing and next-generation surveys.

Panel Discussion

If you have any questions about this event, please reach out to the MICDE Team at micde-contact@umich.edu.