Dayi (David) Li (李大一), Ph.D.

I am an NSERC Canada Postdoctoral Research Award Fellow at the University of Waterloo, jointly appointed to the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science and the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics. At Waterloo, I work with Alex Stringer and Will Percival.

Before joining Waterloo, I was a postdoctoral fellow and PhD student at the University of Toronto, where I worked with Gwendolyn Eadie, Patrick Brown, and Roberto Abraham. During my doctoral studies, I was a Data Sciences Institute Doctoral Fellow and a CANSSI Ontario Multidisciplinary Doctoral trainee.

I am interested in developing spatial statistical models to solve complex astrophysical problems, particularly regarding ultra-diffuse galaxies and star clusters. I also spend my time designing and studying theoretical properties of fast, approximate Bayesian inference methods facilitated by modern machine learning methods.

• A representative paper for detecting ultra-diffuse galaxies can be found at: "Poisson Cluster Process for Detecting Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies", The Annals of Applied Statistics.

• A representative paper of the discovery and validation of an almost dark galaxy can be found at: "Candidate Dark Galaxy-2: Validation and Analysis of an Almost Dark Galaxy in the Perseus Cluster", The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

  • Media Coverage: AAS Nova; EarthSky.org