Joshua Speagle
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistical Sciences and David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics
Joshua Speagle is an Assistant Professor of Astrostatistics jointly appointed between the Department of Statistical Sciences and the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics. His research focuses on trying to use a combination of astronomy, statistics and data science to understand how galaxies like our own Milky Way form, behave and evolve over time. This often involves working with a diverse set of large datasets from wide-field imaging and spectroscopic surveys containing observations ranging from billions of stars and galaxies to interstellar gas and dust. It also is an incredibly collaborative endeavour involving many other faculty members both at the University of Toronto and at other research institutions around the world. A full list of recent publications can be found on his personal website, which includes work to reconstruct the growth of star-forming galaxies over the last few billion years, develop statistical software for deriving robust model uncertainties and create a detailed map of the dust and gas in the galactic neighbourhood surrounding our sun.
Speagle received his bachelor of arts in astrophysics and physics from Harvard University in 2015. After spending 2015 to 2016 working at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo, he returned to Harvard University in 2016 to continue his graduate studies and received his master of arts and doctor of philosophy from the Department of Astronomy in 2020. He was then a Banting & Dunlap Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto from 2020 to 2022 before joining the Faculty in July 2022.