When: February 2, 2018 @ 1:00-2:00pm 
Where: PAB, 3rd floor, B305

From Dark Matter to Galaxies: Probing the Spatial Structure of the Universe on Small Scales

The last decade has seen an explosion of high precision measurements of the structure of the universe, courtesy of large galaxy surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Galaxy clustering measurements encode information about the nature and abundance of dark matter and dark energy, as well as the complex physical process of galaxy formation. However, harnessing the full constraining power of the data is very challenging since it requires a detailed understanding of the statistical and systematic uncertainties in both data and models, which in turn demands significant computational effort. I will discuss my ongoing research program to analyze SDSS data and model it with the help of cosmological N-body simulations, highlighting results from both recent and ongoing projects.