Dr. Joachim Harnois-Deraps is a cosmologist specialising in the study of dark matter, dark energy, massive neutrinos, baryon feedback mechanisms and modifications to the theory of gravity.  He is particularly interested in the technique of weak gravitational lensing, which measures the distortions on the shape of background galaxies by the foreground cosmic web.

Alone or in combination with other probes, weak lensing can reveal a wealth of information about our Universe, including maps of the invisible dark matter. 

I am part of the Kilo Degree Survey, LSST and Euclid, wherein I am developping novel techniques to better analyse cosmic shear data. My novel simulation-based methods can improve by a factor of three the precision on the dark energy equation of state.

Joachim Harnois-Deraps is the PI of the Scinet LIght-Cone Simulation suites (SLICS), a public series of over 1000 N-body runs ideally suited to estimate the uncertainty about cosmological measurement, including cosmic shear, galaxy-galaxy lensing, galaxy clustering and redshift space distortions -- the SLICS were central to 30 journal papers to date, see https://slics.roe.ac.uk. 

Joachim is now an Ernest Rutherford Fellow at Newcastle University, and is leading the core numerical simulation programme in many international weak lensing collaborations (KiDS, LSST and Euclid). You can find a list of his publications here.