Dr Lucy Oswald

Biography

I am a Stephen Hawking Research Fellow and upcoming ERC Starting Grant holder. Since January 2026 I’m an Assistant Professor in Data Driven Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, initially balancing this with my role as Lecturer in AI and Data Science in Astronomy at the University of Southampton.

Before coming to Southampton I was an independent research fellow, or “Fellow by Examination”, at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. I completed my DPhil in Astrophysics at the University of Oxford in 2021, focusing on understanding radio pulsars using modern broad-band observations.

Research

My research speciality is in applying new techniques to enormous data sets of radio observations of pulsars to understand how they behave. I work with some of the largest pulsar surveys made with the world’s best radio telescopes: the Parkes Young Pulsar Array on the Murriyang telescope, and the Thousand-Pulsar-Array on the MeerKAT telescope. I am also preparing for the exciting pulsar science that will become possible with the SKA telescopes. I’m particularly interested in population statistics, polarization, and in using pulsars as tools to probe the invisible structures of the galaxy that make up the interstellar medium (ISM). For full details, see my website at https://www.lsoswald.com/