Summary
Roberto Trotta is Professor of Astrostatistics in the Astrophysics Group, where he studies dark matter, dark energy and the Big Bang with advanced statistical methods, machine learning and data science. He is also an Academic Fellow at Imperial's Data Science Institute. He has been the Director of Imperial's Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication from Aug 2015 until July 2020.
Roberto is presently on leave of absence from Imperial, and has joined the faculty of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, as part of the senior leadership team of a new Data Science Excellence Department there.
Bio sketch
Roberto was born and grew up in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. After obtaining an MSc(hons) in Physics from ETH Zurich and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Geneva, he moved to Oxford where he was the Lockyer Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society at Oxford University, and a Junior Fellow of St Anne's, before being appointed as a Lecturer at Imperial in 2008, where he is Professor of Astrostatistics in the Physics Department, and has directed the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication (2015-2020).
Roberto is a science communicator and a Visiting Professor of Cosmology at Gresham College, London. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research, outreach and teaching, including the Lord Kelvin Award of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (2007), the Michelson Prize of Case Western Reserve University (2008), a President's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016) and a President's Leadership Award for Excellence in Societal Engagement (2018) at Imperial College London. In 2019, he was awarded the Georges Lemaitre Chair of the University of Louvaine. He was awarded the Annie Maunder Medal 2020 of the Royal Astronomical Society for his work in public understanding of astronomy and cosmology.
His award-winning first book for the public, "The Edge of the Sky: All you need to know about the All-There-Is", endeavours to explain the Universe using only the most common 1,000 words in English. Roberto was named as one of the 100 Global Thinkers 2014 by Foreign Policy magazine (Nov 2014), for "junking astronomy jargon".
He is a co-founder and director at Data Fusion Consultants, offering statistical consultancy and custom-made data analysis solutions. He works as a scientific consultant with museums, writers, film makers and artists, providing the help and support they need to make their artistic creations scientifically sound.
For more information, visit www.robertotrotta.com
Publications
Journals
Autenrieth M, van Dyk D, Trotta R, et al., 2024, Stratified learning: a general-purpose statistical method for improved learning under covariate shift, Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, Vol:17, ISSN:1932-1864
Agostini F, Maouloud SEMA, Althueser L, et al., 2023, Erratum to: Sensitivity of the DARWIN observatory to the neutrinoless double beta decay of <sup>136</sup> Xe (The European Physical Journal C, (2020), 80, 9, (808), 10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-8196-z), European Physical Journal C, Vol:83, ISSN:1434-6044
Heavens A, Trotta R, Mootoovaloo A, et al., 2023, Extreme data compression for Bayesian model comparison, Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol:2023, ISSN:1475-7516
Crisostomi M, Dey K, Barausse E, et al., 2023, Neural posterior estimation with guaranteed exact coverage: The ringdown of GW150914, Physical Review D, Vol:108, ISSN:2470-0010
Karchev K, Trotta R, Weniger C, 2023, SICRET: Supernova Ia Cosmology with truncated marginal neural Ratio EsTimation, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol:520, ISSN:0035-8711, Pages:1056-1072