Manda Banerji

Contact me at: Institute of Astronomy University of Cambridge Madingley Road Cambridge CB3 0HA United Kingdom Email: mbanerji@ast.cam.ac.uk

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher within the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. . My main research interests lie in the fields of observational cosmology and galaxy formation and evolution. In particular, I am interested in exploiting multi-wavelength data sets in order to detect distant objects in our Universe and understand their formation and evolutionary history. I am involved in a number of multi-wavelength large-scale surveys. Much of my postdoctoral research involves working on the VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS) , one of six public surveys being conducted on the Visible and Infra-Red Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). One of the principal science goals of this survey is the detection of high-redshift quasars which are some of the brightest and rarest objects in our Universe. Other survey projects that I am also involved in include the Dark Energy Survey (DES) due to start in 2011 as well as the Euclid mission concept. Much of my research has involved developing techniques to calculate the redshifts of objects in such surveys from their broadband colours. I am also interested in studying massive galaxies in our Universe and characterising star formation processes in the early Universe.

I completed my PhD in 2009 at University College London where I belonged to the Astrophysics Group within the Department of Physics and Astronomy. My thesis titled "Galaxies in the distant Universe: Colours, Redshifts and Star Formation" was supervised by Prof. Ofer Lahav.

Before starting my PhD, I did my undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. I also worked for a year as a research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory.