Stefan Schuldt is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milan under supervision of Prof. Claudio Grillo.
After obtaining his Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Munich, he pursued a PhD jointly at the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics and the Technical University of Munich under supervision of Prof. Sherry Suyu. After a short postdoctoral position at the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics, he joined in October 2022 the group of Prof. Claudio Grillo.
During his Master and PhD, he focused on modeling strong gravitational lenses on galaxy-scale. Specifically, he modelled the famous Cosmic Horseshoe lensing system as his masters’ thesis project by combining HST observations and X-Shooter velocity dispersion measurements. During his PhD, he developed within the HOLISMOKES collaboration machine learning techniques to obtain the mass model parameter values of galaxy-scale lensing systems observed by the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) in preparation for LSST, which is expected to provide very similar data. This speeds up the parameter prediction by orders of magnitudes, making it possible to process all expected tens of thousands lenses, and plan follow-up observations for lensed transients like supernovae in time. As a side project, he developed NetZ, a CNN to predict photometric redshifts of galaxies based on their HSC images directly.
While he lead projects in the HOLISMOKES collaboration, he is active is multiple other collaboration such as the TDCosmo and LensWatch collaboration. By joining the University of Milan, he also joined the Zooming collaboration.