Each year, the Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA) at the University of Sydney invites an internationally renowned speaker to deliver their Hunstead lecture series, consisting of five talks on a key topic in astrophysics over one week. This year, Dr. Bryan Scott, LSST-DA Data Science Fellowship Program (DSFP) Postdoctoral Fellow at CIERA, was chosen as the Hunstead lecturer.
“I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to deliver the Hunstead lectureship,” said Dr. Scott. “Past lecturers are giants of the field and it is humbling to be included with them in any group.”
The 2024 Hunstead lectures took place over the week of November 25. Each weekday, Dr. Scott presented on a topic related to his areas of expertise. As the LSST-DA DSFP Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Scott has a leading role in data science training and education and researches the use of large galaxy surveys to constrain cosmology and astrophysics over cosmic time. “The focus of my talks was on the major challenges related to big data in survey astronomy over the coming decade, what has already been done to address them, what problems remain to be solved, and what research directions seem promising”, explained Dr. Scott. “Overall, my lectureship centered on empowering early career researchers to think deeply about these open questions and highlighted the ways we aim to do that in the community more broadly.”
“Choosing Dr. Scott as the Hunstead lecturer for 2024 is closely tied to the purpose of the series (and the Dick Hunstead Fund for Astrophysics in general), which is to support astronomy students and early career researchers,” shared Kovi Rose, PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, Dr. Scott’s local host, and a DSFP Fellow himself. “Given the rapidly accelerating volume and rate of data in the field of astronomy, data science training is critical in supporting the next generation of astronomers. And as a co-organiser and lecturer in the LSST-DA DSFP, Bryan was an obvious choice to help provide some of that training and to share the DSFP with our local Australian astronomical community.”
“Being selected to deliver the Hunstead lectureship validates our work in the Data Science Fellowship Program advancing the intersection of data science and astronomy education,” said Dr. Scott. The DSFP is a two-year training program designed to teach skills required for Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) science that are not easily addressed by current astrophysics programs. Applications for Cohort 8 are open at the time of this article’s publishing and close on January 22, 2025.