Jean-Luc Starck

HEAD OF COSMOSTAT

Contact Information
E-mail: jstarck [at] cea [dot] fr
Phone: +33 (0)1 69 08 57 64
Office: 275
Affiliation: IRFU/DAp-AIM
Website: http://jstarck.cosmostat.org/

CosmoStat: Since the dawn of time, humans have been wondering about their place in the Universe. Today, cosmologists thinks their place is actually very small, with 95% of the Universe made of exotic dark energy and dark matter, which doesn't even exist on earth. The best way to understand what the nature of dark energy and dark matter are is to study distant galaxies with new space missions like the Euclid telescope, which will measure the position and shapes of billions of galaxies. This is a big data problem for cosmology and so innovative statistical methods are at the heart of cosmology today. I founded CosmoStat in 2010 to bring together an interdisciplinary team of scientists who could approach this problem both from the cosmology and the statistical side and develop crucial solutions like sparsity and compressed sensing methods which could be used to answer fundamental cosmological questions about the nature of our Universe.

Biography:  Jean-Luc Starck is Director of Research and head of  the CosmoStat laboratory at the Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe, Département d'Astrophysique, CEA-Saclay, France. Jean-Luc Starck has a Ph.D from Nice Observatory and an Habilitation from University Paris XI. He was a visitor at the European Southern Observatory in 1993, at UCLA in 2004 and at Stanford’s Department of Statistics in 2000 and 2005.  Since 1994, he is a tenured researcher at CEA. He created in 2010 the CosmoStat laboratory and is strongly involved in the Euclid ESA space mission. He received the EADS prize of the French Academy of Science in 2011, the International Astrostatistics Association (IAA) Fellow Prize in 2016 and the 2018 Gruber Price in Cosmology (as member of the ESA Planck team).

He leads Cosmostat, an interdisciplinary research group at the interface between cosmology and statistical methods with a focus on industry-academia partnership. He has organized 16 conferences, and was keynote, invited or seminar speaker over fifty times in the last five years.  Over the last 10 years, he has been involved as Co-I or PI in the management of 8 million euros of grants from national, European and international sources, including a senior ERC. He has published over 200 refereed papers in astrophysics, cosmology, signal processing and applied mathematics, and he is also author of three books.

Professional Management Positions:

  • Head of the CosmoStat laboratory at CEA/Saclay since 2010.
  • Leader of the level 3 Organization Unit in the Euclid Consortium (a unit regrouping 250 researchers dedicated to design the algorithms that will be used  to deliver  ESA Euclid products such as power spectra and mass maps).
  • Leader of the OULE3-Weak Lensing Work Package in the Euclid Consortium.
  • Associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences (SIIMS).
  • PI of the DEDALE project (EU H2020-FETOPEN), Data Learning on Manifolds and Future Challenges.

Field of Expertise:

  • Cosmology:
    • Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): CMB map reconstruction, non Gaussianity, primordial power spectrum estimation.
    • Weak lensing: Point Spread Function estimation, Galaxy shape measurement,  2D convergence map reconstruction, 3D density fluctuation mass mapping, peak counting, halo detectio.
    • Large scale structure of the Universe:  Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation, wide-field and deep surveys.
  • Statistical methods:
    • Machine Learning
    • Sparse representation: wavelets, curvelets, dictionary learning, morphological diversity.
    • Compressed sensing.
    • Blind source separation.
    • Inverse problems: denoising, image deconvolution.
    • High-dimensional data processing.
  • Knowledge & Technology Transfer.

 See also