I am a Leverhulme Trust and Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge. I am also a Postdoctoral Affiliate of Newnham College.
I am working at the interface of Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) astrophysics and cosmology, focusing on solving the intrinsic dispersion in SN Ia luminosities to improve their standardisation for cosmological analyses. I do this by exploring the correlations between SN Ia luminosity and their host galaxy environments (the largest systematic uncertainty in modern SN cosmology), for both entire host galaxies and sub-galactic local regions. I am particularly interested in supernova siblings (multiple supernovae in the same host galaxy) which provide a unique way to disentangle global and local environmental effects on supernova luminosities. I am currently using data from my Hubble Space Telescope program to study the local environments of low-redshift supernova siblings.
Alongside my research, I co-created and co-lead Kilonova Seekers, a citizen science project on the Zooniverse where members of the public help discover transient events in data from the GOTO telescope network. I also co-lead science communication for 4MOST, coordinating press activities and outreach for this next-generation spectroscopic survey.
I am a member of the Dark Energy Survey, GOTO, 4MOST (Time-Domain Extragalactic Survey), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST collaborations, and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
I was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth (2021–2024), where I worked on electromagnetic follow-up of gravitational-wave events and supernova environments. Before that, I completed my PhD at the University of Southampton (2017–2021), studying the effect of environment on type Ia supernovae in the Dark Energy Survey. I hold an MSc in Astrophysics from University College London and a BSc in Physics from the University of Surrey. Between my BSc and MSc, I worked in astronomy outreach at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 0HA
lisa.kelsey@ast.cam.ac.uk