Abbe Whitford

Biography

I graduated from Griffith University with a BSc (majoring in physics and mathematics) in 2019, and a BSc honours Class I (physics) in 2021 at University of Queensland. My honours project was supervised by Dr Cullan Howlett (UQ) and Professor Tamara Davis (UQ). For this project I produced theoretical forecasts for the ability of various upcoming galaxy surveys that will measure redshifts and peculiar motions to constrain the masses of neutrinos. I commenced my PhD at UQ in January 2022 and have since been using simulations to test how well we can measure the bulk flow motions of galaxies and made a measurement of the bulk flow with the CosmicFlows-4 peculiar velocity dataset. For the remainder of my PhD I aim to focus on measuring properties of neutrinos or additional exotic particle species, such as sterile neutrinos, using measurements of the Large Scale Structure from DESI data (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument).

Research interests: Particle cosmology, neutrinos, Large Scale Structure (LSS) of the universe, galaxy peculiar motions and bulk flows, theoretical and observational cosmology.