Congratulations to Dr. Mansour Karami!

Congratulations to Dr. Mansour Karami, who has just successfully defended his PhD thesis, entitled:

"Probing the dark universe with gravitational lensing"

Mansour's PhD focused on different ways in which gravitational lensing teaches us about dark objects in the universe:

• He developed a sophisticated statistical method to infer the effect of gravitational lensing by dark matter nanostructure in the light curves of strongly lensed quasars, which has yielded strongest constraints to-date on dark matter clustering on small scales.
• He showed that interferometric radio observations can provide the first images (and movies) of microlensing of stars by black holes, and how they can be used to constrain the black hole population our Galaxy.
• He worked on the development of Themis, a state-of-the-art Monte Carlo Markov Chain machine that finds the physical models that best fit the radio observations of supermassive black holes obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope.

Here is a picture of Mansour, with his proud co-supervisors, and a cake that features pictures from his thesis: From Left to Right: Me marveling at the cake, the freshly minted doctor, and his other proud co-supervisor, Avery Broderick (photo courtesy of Jorge Preciado) And here is a picture of the said cake, which you can understand better by reading Mansour's thesis! Mansours' PhD cake! We wish Mansour all the best in his future adventures in the world of quantitative finance 👏😲😉