Lucia is an astrophysicist who uses machine learning, cosmological simulations, and galaxy formation models to explore the galaxy-halo connection and what it can tell us about the evolution of the universe. She is currently a Flatiron postdoctoral Fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics, and also a fellow in Princeton's Future Faculty in the Physical Sciences program. Her Ph.D. in Astrophysics is from Arizona State University, where she primarily used the clustering of galaxies to explore things like the evolution of Lyman-alpha emitters and the pace and extent of reionization.
***Want to work with me? Send me an email! And apply to the CCA's predoctoral program if you're a PhD student: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/flatiron-institute-center-for-computational-astrophysics-pre-doctoral-program/ ***
***Want to work with me? Send me an email! And apply to the CCA's predoctoral program if you're a PhD student: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/flatiron-institute-center-for-computational-astrophysics-pre-doctoral-program/ ***
Some Ongoing Projects
CosmoBench: A Cosmology Benchmark for Geometric Deep Learning
A very interesting project connecting cosmologists at the Center for Computational Astrophysics with graph experts at the Center for Computational Mathematics! Featuring the merger trees from my CAMELS-SAM simulation suite. Accepted to NeurIPS 2025!
Co-leading the LtU Connections working group, to make the first end-to-end data set that goes from initial conditions + cosmology --> galaxies in observable space.
Expanding CAMELS-SAM to explore the galaxy-halo connection
I created 1000 N-body only simulations, ran them through the Santa Cruz SAM, measured lots of galaxy clustering, and fed it all to deep neural networks to try and predict the input parameters! What's next?
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Random Publications
The CAMELS project: public data release
Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Shy Genel, Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, Lucia A. Perez, Pablo Villanueva-Domingo, Digvijay Wadekar, Helen Shao, Faizan G. Mohammad, Sultan Hassan, Emily Moser, Erwin T. Lau, Luis Fernando Machado Poletti Valle, Andrina Nicola, Leander Thiele, Yongseok Jo, Oliver H. E. Philcox, Benjamin D. Oppenheimer, Megan Tillman, ChangHoon Hahn, Neerav Kaushal, Alice Pisani, Matthew Gebhardt, Ana Maria Delgado, Joyce Caliendo, Christina Kreisch, Kaze W.K. Wong, William R. Coulton, Michael Eickenberg, Gabriele Parimbelli, Yueying Ni, Ulrich P. Steinwandel, Valentina La Torre, Romeel Dave, Nicholas Battaglia, Daisuke Nagai, David N. Spergel, Lars Hernquist, Blakesley Burkhart, Desika Narayanan, Benjamin Wandelt, Rachel S. Somerville, Greg L. Bryan, Matteo Viel, Yin Li, Vid Irsic, Katarina Kraljic, Mark Vogelsberger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01300
Constraining cosmology with machine learning and galaxy clustering: the CAMELS-SAM suite
Lucia A. Perez, Shy Genel, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Rachel S. Somerville, Austen Gabrielpillai, Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, Benjamin D. Wandelt, L. Y. Aaron Yung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02408
New spectroscopic confirmations of Lyman-α emitters at z ∼ 7 from the LAGER survey
Santosh Harish, Isak G. B. Wold, Sangeeta Malhotra, James Rhoads, Weida Hu, Junxian Wang, Zhen-ya Zheng, L. Felipe Barrientos, Jorge González-López, Lucia A. Perez, Ali Ahmad Khostovan, Leopoldo Infante, Chunyan Jiang, Cristóbal Moya-Sierralta, John Pharo, Francisco Valdes, Huan Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01173
CosmoBench: A Multiscale, Multiview, Multitask Cosmology Benchmark for Geometric Deep Learning
Ningyuan (Teresa) Huang, Richard Stiskalek, Jun-Young Lee, Adrian E. Bayer, Charles C. Margossian, Christian Kragh Jespersen, Lucia A. Perez, Lawrence K. Saul, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro
arXiv e-prints, Accepted to NeurIPS 2025, 2025 Jul, pp. arXiv:2507.03707
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Beyond academia
My own journey to where I am; and how I work to make science accessible, welcoming, and fair for everyone.
or, how to socialize a semiferal rescue that's spent most of her life hiding from all cats and people
Curious for an update on the semiferal, wallflower cutie patootie I adopted July 2024? You're in the right place!
Talks, trips, and programs I've taken part in to share astronomy and science with more people. Would you like me to come talk to a group or class? Please contact me, I would probably love to!
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