Rebecca Chen

Rebecca Chen’s research is focused on understanding the nature of dark energy, the unexplained driver of the accelerated expansion of our universe. To do so, she uses Type Ia supernovae, extremely luminous exploding stars, to trace cosmic expansion history. As a Ph.D. student at Duke University, Chen conducted analyses with the Dark Energy Survey to establish the feasibility of a novel approach to supernova cosmology, using photometric redshifts. This method aims to address a key challenge for upcoming next-generation surveys, which will observe multiple orders of magnitude more supernovae than our current largest compilations and vastly outpace our spectroscopic resources. As a Brinson Prize Fellow at Stanford University, Chen will refine and extend her work in order to quantify and reduce key systematics leading up to the first cosmology results from the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the Roman Space Telescope.