Bio

Shirley Ho is an American astrophysicist and machine learning expert, currently at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute in NYC and at the New York University. A cited expert in cosmology, machine learning applications in astrophysics, and data science, her interests include developing and deploying deep learning techniques to better understand our Universe and other astrophysical phenomena. Shirley Ho has led the first application of deep convolutional neural networks in cosmology and has since pushed forward the adoption of modern deep learning methods in the astrophysics community. More recently, Shirley Ho has led her team on a series of papers on accelerating simulations with artificial intelligence and developing novel techniques in interpretable machine learning. Shirley Ho is the recipient of several awards and honors such as the Cooper-Siegel named development chair professorship at Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Science Award, the Macronix Prize, the NASA Group Achievement Award, Chamberlain Fellowship, and Seaborg Fellowship from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She was recently nominated to be the International Astrostatistics Association Fellow. Her work has been featured in WIRED magazine, Quanta magazine, Scientific American, the New Scientist, and so on. At Simons Foundation, she is the group leader of Cosmology X Data Science in the Center for Computational Astrophysics. Ho has worked to promote the ethical use of AI while adopting open source principles. She serves on multiple committees for both federal and international agencies, including NASA, NSF, DOE, DFG (German NSF), and SNSF(Swiss NSF). She is currently serving a 3-year term on the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee.