Dily Duan Yi Ong
University of Cambridge
I am a final-year PhD student at the University of Cambridge and a cosmologist specialising in the development of machine-learning-enhanced Bayesian inference tools to understand the structure, evolution, and composition of the universe, supervised by Dr Will Handley. Prior to joining Cambridge, I completed my undergraduate and master’s degrees at Imperial College London.
I am the author of unimpeded, a Python package that transforms months of supercomputer calculations into seconds on the laptops of cosmologists and astrophysicists, democratising access to expensive nested sampling chains, enabling cosmological model comparison and observational dataset analysis for researchers worldwide. I am also a contributing author of anesthetic, a Python package for processing cosmological nested sampling and MCMC chains.
Total first-author citations: 78
Research Interests: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Bayesian Statistics, Machine Learning, Model Comparison, Tension Quantification, Nested Sampling
Contact me: dlo26@cam.ac.uk
News
| Sep 2026 | Author of a feature article published in BlueSci Issue 64, the University of Cambridge’s longest-running science magazine, with an accompanying animation. |
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| Sep 2026 | Contributed speaker at the Kavli Astrophysics Symposium 2026 at the University of Cambridge. |
| Sep 2026 | First-author paper published in JCAP 09 (2026) 026: unimpeded: A Public Grid of Nested Sampling Chains for Cosmological Model Comparison and Tension Analysis. |
| Aug 2026 | Contributed speaker at the European Coalition for AI in Fundamental Physics Conference 2026. |
| Jul 2026 | Principal Investigator (PI), awarded UKRI-funded DiRAC HPC seedcorn project on Cambridge CSD3 to map the prior-sensitivity of cosmological Bayesian evidence via importance sampling (100,000 CPU hours). |
| Jul 2026 | Academic visitor and guest speaker at the University of Oxford. |
| Jun 2026 | First-author paper accepted for publication in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. |
| Jun 2026 | Principal Investigator (PI), awarded UKRI-funded DiRAC HPC discretionary project on Tursa to train machine learning emulators (10,000 GPU hours). |
| May 2026 | Accepted for two contributed talks in the National Astronomical Meeting (NAM) 2026, the UK’s largest astronomy conference. |
| May 2026 | Elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. |
| May 2026 | Contributed speaker at the Asia-Pacific Regional IAU Meeting (APRIM) 2026, one of the largest astronomy conferences in Asia. |
| Apr 2026 | Invited Guest Speaker: two-week fully funded academic visit to the University of Tokyo. |