The universe seems unbelievably vast, a sky filled with countless stars and worlds. Well, maybe not so countless as there’s a whole field devoted to crunching the numbers associated with an ever-expanding universe. Astrostatistics is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories

Jessi Cisewski-Kehe is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on methodological development for complicated datasets of which closed-form models and likelihood functions are not able to fully capture the desirable and interesting features of the observations. Statistical challenges in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology (i.e., astrostatistics) are a primary focus of her work.

Chad Schafer is a professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Since his Ph.D. work at the University of California at Berkeley, he has worked on statistical challenges that arise in astronomy, with a particular focus on the handling of complex estimation problems. He is currently involved with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, to be conducted at the under-construction Vera C. Rubin Observatory, co-chairing its Informatics and Statistics Science Collaboration since 2015.