Introducing Oliver Philcox:
Joined the Department September, 2025
Hello! I’m Oliver, a new Assistant Professor in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology(KIPAC) and the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stanford (LITP). I am delighted to be joining Stanford’s wonderful community of students, postdocs, faculty, administrators and beyond!
I grew up in the south of England and completed my undergraduate studies in the University of Cambridge. After receiving a Herchel-Smith scholarship, I spent a fun year performing research in Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics, before moving south to undertake a PhD in Princeton. During that time, I was a regular visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study (which has great lunch). I completed my postdoctoral studies in New York as a Junior Fellow of the Simons Society of Fellows, hosted at Columbia, though I spent a large fraction of time at the Flatiron Institute (which also has great lunch). I’m excited to move across the country and explore the science (and lunch) scene in the Bay Area!
Since I was young, I have been fascinated by the physical world and how it can be explained using mathematics. I am particularly tantalized by Big Questions such as: How did the Universe begin? What is its composition? How does it evolve? The key goal of my research program is to shed light on such questions by utilizing mathematical and computational tools to analyze and interpret huge astrophysical datasets.
Cosmology is undergoing a data revolution. Throughout this decade, huge surveys will map the three-dimensional positions of millions of galaxies in the Universe, mapping the cosmos across space and time. These maps encode a wealth of information about the early Universe; by modeling the cosmological evolution using theoretical and numerical techniques, we can “wind back the clock” to obtain glimpses of the Universe’s initial conditions. I am particularly interested in using these observations to understand the first fractions of a second (“inflation”), in particular probing particle physics at energy scales many orders of magnitudes above those accessible to terrestrial colliders. I have already demonstrated that such approaches are feasible for Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data — by developing similar techniques and applying them to galaxy catalogs, we can constrain key quantities such as the masses and spins of novel inflationary particles. This research involves a blend of many techniques, including pen-and-paper theory, statistics, high-performance computing, and beyond.
Stanford is the perfect place in which to pursue such a program. Both the Physics department and SLAC are playing a huge role in cosmological data acquisition and interpretation, for example through the Vera Rubin Observatory, which has recently begun taking data. Furthermore, this research is highly cross-disciplinary so benefits greatly from collaboration with theorists at LITP, analysts at KIPAC, experimentalists at SLAC, and beyond. Perhaps most importantly, Stanford attracts an incredible array of students and postdocs who make the cosmological magic happen!
Beyond cosmology, I am a keen (though novice) scuba diver, hiker, and traveler. I also love to travel through my stomach — in New York, I visited over 250 restaurants! I am excited to experience all that California has to offer!