Hello and welcome! I'm an astrophysicist who uses machine learning, cosmological simulations, and galaxy formation models to explore the galaxy-halo connection in observable space and what it can tell us about the evolution of the universe. I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow in Princeton's Future Faculty in the Physical Sciences program, and as a recently 'graduated' Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics, you'll often find me at the CCA if not at Princeton. My Ph.D. is in Astrophysics from Arizona State University, where I primarily used the clustering of galaxies to explore things like the evolution of Lyman-alpha emitters and the pace and extent of reionization.
I'm on the job market for a tenure track position, and I would love to talk to you and tell you about my research and mentoring plans!
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
Lucia A. Perez, Shy Genel, Elisabeth Krause, rachel somerville
arXiv:2602.04987, Submitted to ApJ
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
Informative Priors on Primordial Non-Gaussianity Bias bphi From Galaxy Formation
Anne Moore, Lucia A. Perez, Elisabeth Krause
Under review for JCAP, 2026
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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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