Professor Emanuele Berti, W. H. Miller Professor Matthieu Wyart, Professor Brice Ménard, and Research Professor Benjamin Wandelt were recently named part of large-scale, multi-institutional collaborations funded by the Simons Foundation.

Berti will be one of 12 co-PIs on the Simons Collaboration on Black Holes and Strong Gravity. Over the course of the four-year grant, the researchers will work to develop a theoretical framework for understanding what gravitational wave data can reveal about some of the universe’s enduring mysteries.

Ménard and Wyart will be part of the four-year Collaboration on the Physics of Learning and Neural Computation. The team of 22 co-PIs aims to establish a new field of science—the physics of learning—at the intersection of physics, mathematics, and computer science.

Another Simons collaboration, Learning the Universe, which began in 2021, was also recently renewed for three years. The renewal includes Wandelt as one of the co-PIs. Learning the Universe is a Simons Collaboration with the following goals: 1) develop physically grounded models for galaxy evolution using multiscale simulations 2) build new tools to create detailed ‘synthetic observations’ based on simulations 3) develop machine learning-based techniques to accelerate forward modeling of cosmological galaxy formation simulations 4) incorporate these new accelerated forward models into traditional and implicit likelihood inference frameworks and use observational data to constrain cosmological parameters, the initial conditions of the Universe, and the uncertainties of galaxy formation modeling.