Austen is a Research Assistant in Exoplanetary Remote Sensing and Data Science at the Institute of Astronomy, working within Professor Nikku Madhusudhan's Hycean group on JWST data reduction and the atmospheric modelling of temperate sub-Neptunes in the search for chemical biosignatures. More broadly, he is interested in bringing modern computational methods to spectral inference, including machine-learning surrogates, Bayesian retrieval and uncertainty quantification for expensive physical models. Austen's PhD is from the University of Southampton, where he developed SPECULATE, an open-source emulator and inference framework for accretion disc winds, and was awarded the 2025 STAG Research Prize for Best Publication in Astrophysics. He has also worked as a research scientist at IBM Research on AI-driven numerical weather prediction and at the UK Atomic Energy Authority on real-time surrogate diagnostics for fusion plasmas.
