Victoria is an excellent Ph.D. student that specializes in COLA quasi-n-body simulations that could be applicable in the context of Rubin Observatory (Cosmic Shear). So what is COLA and why it is important?

The standard method for evaluating nonlinear gravitational collapse involves dark matter-only n-body simulations. Although these simulations provide excellent precision for weak lensing studies, they are computationally expensive. It is simply not feasible to create n-body-based nonlinear matter power spectrum emulators in all appealing models beyond LCDM. The COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration (COLA) is an exciting alternative to full simulations. COLA combines higher-order Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (LPT) on large scales with n-body code on small scales. One COLA run takes a around 3 hours on a 128-core node. 

COLA simulations can reproduce the nonlinear response function down to k around 1h/Mpc when compared with the Euclid Emulator v2.0 within few percent accuracy. Victoria Loyd performed a COLA-based LSST Cosmic Shear analysis on w0waCDM models in collaboration. Her work was the most comprehensive end-to-end LSST-Y1-related study analyzing the precision of the COLA method.

Victoria also has deep interests in Artificial Inteligence and is an author in a number of papers applying AI-techniques.