Welcome!
My name is Aoife Boyle, and I am an Irish physicist living and working in Paris. I have maintained this homepage over the years as a place online to keep a few things related to my various endeavours (my CV, slides from previous seminars, etc.). My name is often a bit bewildering to non-Irish people, but it is pronounced close to 'ee-fah'. The photo on the right was taken at the beautiful Wendelstein Observatory in the Bavarian Alps in 2017.
A Brief History
I completed my PhD in the physical cosmology group at the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Munich in 2019. I was supervised by Eiichiro Komatsu, and the purpose of my work was to identify cosmology-independent probes of the neutrino mass from cosmological large-scale structure (galaxy clustering and CMB lensing). Afterwards, I moved to Paris, where I was employed as a postdoc for almost four years — first at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris and then at CEA, Saclay. I continued to work on cosmology but now as part of a small collaboration working on modelling the one-point statistics of cosmological fields using large-deviation theory.
Although most of my publications are in cosmology, I have maintained a side interest in supernovae, which were the subject of my master's thesis and my first ever publication. TARDIS-SN is an open-source code for numerically modelling the spectra of supernovae through radiative transfer. I was an early contributor to this code and have recently supervised summer interns developing the code through the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) programme. A full list of my research contributions can be found on Google Scholar or under the 'Research' tab on the side menu of this website (click top-left). Some slides from previous talks are also available under the Research tab.
I made the decision last year to leave academia and finished my postdoc contract in the summer of 2023. I am a qualified editor of scientific texts and now work freelance editing the research articles of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) scientists for a wide range of journals. This has given me the time to expand my skillset somewhat, and I recently acquired certifications in both machine learning and quantum computing. I plan to begin searching for full-time work again in the spring of 2024. I am particularly interested in roles that combine original research and software development. If you would like to get in touch with me about career opportunities, please do so! You can add me on LinkedIn using the button below or you can contact me directly using my email (listed in the main menu). Requests about scientific editing work are also welcome.
The Future