Jessie Muir
Cosmology theory and data analysis to learn about fundamental physics.
Education
- PhD, Physics
University of Michigan, 2018 - MPhil, Astronomy
Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, 2013 - MASt, Applied Mathematics (Part III)
Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, 2012 - B.S. Physics & B.S. Astrophysics
Michigan State University, 2010
Contact
- Email: muirjc ~at~ ucmail ~dot~ uc ~dot~ edu
- SciX: bibliography
- ORCID: 0000-0002-7579-770X
- GitHub: jessmuir
I’m an Assistant Professor in the University of Cincinnati Physics department interested in using cosmological observations to better understand and constrain fundamental physics. I’m also interested in science outreach and in making STEM fields more accessible and welcoming to everyone. I do research as part of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration and the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time Dark Energy Science Collaboration (LSST DESC).
I grew up in Romeo, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. I received my undergraduate degree from Michigan State University, where I did an astrophysics undergrad thesis supervised by Mark Voit. I spent two years at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar where I completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos and then spent a year working on modified gravity research with Anne-Christine Davis. I got my PhD at University of Michigan’s Department of Physics, where my advisor was Dragan Huterer. I did two postdocs, one as a Porat Fellow at Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford, where I was part of Risa Wechsler’s galaxy formation and cosmology group, and one as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Teaching
- PHYS 4025/8025: Stellar Astrophysics (undergraduate Intro to Astrophysics I / graduate Astrophysics I)
- Fall 2025
- Fall 2026
- PHYS 4026/8026: Cosmology (undergraduate Intro to Astrophysics II / graduate Astrophysics II)
- Spring 2027
News and updates
- March 2026 - I gave a public talk at the Cincinnati Observatory about dark energy and the large-scale structure of the Universe.
- January 2026 - DES Year 6 combined results from galaxy clustering and weak lensing were released. Papers can be found on this page, and a recording of the results announcement webinar can be found here.
- March 2025 - Cosmology results from expansion history probes (BAO and supernovae) from the completed Dark Energy Survey, which I contributed to obtaining, were released on arXiv. I presented the results on behalf of the DES collaboration at the APS Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California.