David Richard Harvey

Biography

I am an observational and theoretical astrophysicist at EPFL. My main area of research is dark matter and trying to understand its properties and dynamics. My undergraduate degree at the University of Sheffield consisted of two years of a business man- agement degree, and a three year physics and astrophysics degree whereby I finished top of my class and earned the Hicks prize for best achieving student. My success at undergraduate level led me to embark on a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where my thesis entitled “Measuring the self-interaction cross-section of dark matter with astronomical particle colliders” earned runner up in the best astronomy and astrophysics thesis in the UK award, 2014. This prestigious award recognised the theoretical and observational work that I carried out during my PhD. It also led me to publish in total four papers of which three I am first author. These papers investigated a variety of topics including, systematics in weak lensing, theoretical frameworks of dark matter, citizen science and machine learning techniques to find galaxy clusters leading me to become an expert in dark matter and gravitational lensing. Since completing my PhD I have taken up a post-doctoral position at EPFL where I have led different projects across extragalactic science. In my first year I wrote my paper, “The nongravitational interactions of dark matter in colliding galaxy clusters.”, which was published in Science last year and received international attention, appearing on the front page of many UK, French, Swiss and US newspapers, and the BBC, NASA and ESA websites. Moreover I have collaborated with many different professors in the department including Dr. Frederic Courbin and Dr. Jean-Paul Kneib to publish two separate papers as first author, demonstrating how flexible I am at working with different academics. Moreover, I published in collaboration with others around the world work on potentially the first signs of interacting dark matter in the cluster A3827, and I developed the weak lensing pipeline that it is used in many of the Hubble Frontier Fields models. My contribution since arriving at EPFL has also led to development of younger academics within the department. Firstly, I have led three different students projects, including two masters students and a PhD based on finding and understanding the fields around strong gravitational lenses. Secondly, I have designed, developed and delivered a course for students on how to give scientific presentations. This aims to develop students confidence and ability to present complex scientific problems to a broad range of audiences. This scheme was a huge a success and I will continue to run it.