Dr Anais Moller

Biography

Dr. Anais Möller is an ARC DECRA Fellow and leads research in the areas of cosmology and transient astrophysics. To do so, she works with extremely large astronomical datasets. To maximize the information we can use to understand our Universe, she develops innovative tools with machine learning.

Dr. Möller leads Fink broker (https://fink-broker.org). Fink has been awarded priviledged real-time access to transients in the largest optical survey in the world at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Fink selects the most exciting transients for a variety of science cases using data-intensive technologies and expands our understanding on extreme transients.

Dr. Möller constrains the nature of Dark Energy with Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia). SNe Ia are very energetic stellar explosions. They are the best “standardizable candles”: objects with reproducible luminosities, used to measure distances in the Universe and thus the effect of Dark Energy. She specialises in reducing current limitations to obtain orders of magnitude more SNe Ia than traditional methods and modelling selection biases, thus providing precise constraints on the nature of Dark Energy.

Dr. Möller studies multi-wavelength and messenger fast-transients. Fast transients include some of the most exotic explosions and collisions or mergers in the universe, involving black holes, magnetars, neutron stars, blitzars, extreme novae and supernovae. Her research includes the search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves as part of the Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (ARC CoE OzGrav), in which Dr. Möller is an Associate Investigator.

Dr. Möller develops high-end machine learning algorithms for astronomy and cosmology.  She works towards interpretability of ML and introduced Bayesian Neural Networks to astrophysical classification problems. ML is a powerful tool and she has developed various applications tackling transient event detection and light-curve classification.