Dily Duan Yi Ong

University of Cambridge

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I am a final-year PhD student at the University of Cambridge and a cosmologist specialising in the development of machine-learning-enhanced Bayesian inference tools to understand the structure, evolution, and composition of the universe, supervised by Dr Will Handley. Prior to joining Cambridge, I completed my undergraduate and master’s degrees at Imperial College London.

I am the author of unimpeded, a Python package that transforms months of supercomputer calculations into seconds on the laptops of cosmologists and astrophysicists, democratising access to expensive nested sampling chains, enabling cosmological model comparison and observational dataset analysis for researchers worldwide. I am also a contributing author of anesthetic, a Python package for processing cosmological nested sampling and MCMC chains.

Research Interests: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Bayesian Statistics, Machine Learning, Model Comparison, Tension Quantification, Nested Sampling

Contact me: dlo26@cam.ac.uk

News

Aug 2026 Contributed speaker at the European Coalition for AI in Fundamental Physics Conference 2026.
Jul 2026 Principal Investigator (PI), awarded UKRI-funded DiRAC HPC seedcorn project on Cambridge CSD3 to map the prior-sensitivity of cosmological Bayesian evidence via importance sampling (100,000 CPU hours).
Jul 2026 Academic visitor and guest speaker at the University of Oxford.
Jun 2026 First-author paper accepted for publication in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Jun 2026 Principal Investigator (PI), awarded UKRI-funded DiRAC HPC discretionary project on Tursa to train machine learning emulators (10,000 GPU hours).
May 2026 Accepted for two contributed talks in the National Astronomical Meeting (NAM) 2026, the UK’s largest astronomy conference.
May 2026 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
May 2026 Contributed speaker at the Asia-Pacific Regional IAU Meeting (APRIM) 2026, one of the largest astronomy conferences in Asia.
Apr 2026 Invited Guest Speaker: two-week fully funded academic visit to the University of Tokyo.

Publications

  1. arXiv
    The Bayesian view of DESI DR2 with unimpeded: Evidence and tension in a combined analysis with CMB and supernovae across cosmological models
    Dily Duan Yi Ong, David Yallup, and Will Handley
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05472, Mar 2026
  2. arXiv
    Signatures of star formation inside galactic outflows
    Dily Duan Yi Ong, Francesco D’Eugenio, Roberto Maiolino, and 13 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.10924, Dec 2025
  3. arXiv
    A Bayesian Perspective on Evidence for Evolving Dark Energy
    Dily Duan Yi Ong, David Yallup, and Will Handley
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.10631, Nov 2025
  4. JCAP
    unimpeded: A Public Grid of Nested Sampling Chains for Cosmological Model Comparison and Tension Analysis
    Dily Duan Yi Ong and Will Handley
    JCAP, Jun 2026
    Accepted for publication
  5. arXiv
    unimpeded: A Public Nested Sampling Database for Bayesian Cosmology
    Dily Duan Yi Ong and Will Handley
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.05470, Nov 2025