Anto I Lonappan

I hail from the beautiful city of Pathanamthitta in Kerala, India. My educational journey began at the Seventh-day Adventist school, and I later attended St. Pius X in Kuttikanam for my higher secondary education. Driven by an early passion for physics, I embarked on a Bachelor's degree at St. Berchman's College, Changanassery in 2010, where I also completed my Master's degree in Physics in 2016. It was during my Master's that my fascination with cosmology truly took off, leading to a thesis on Bayesian inference of cosmological data with Dr. Charles Jose.

Post-graduation, I joined the Centre for Theoretical Physics at Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) in New Delhi as a project student with Prof. Anjan Ananda Sen. This opportunity led to my first publication, which explored dark energy through a comprehensive analysis of cosmological data. My journey continued as a Junior Research Fellow at Presidency University, Kolkata, where I dived into research on the interplay between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

In 2018, I was excited to join the PhD program in Astrophysics and Cosmology at SISSA in Trieste, Italy. During my time at SISSA, I became an active member of the POLARBEAR, Simons Array, Simons Observatory and LiteBIRD collaborations, all dedicated to probing Inflationary Gravitational Waves. My PhD journey was guided by the exceptional mentorship of Prof. Carlo Baccigalupi, Dr. Nicoletta Krachmalnicoff, and Dr. Davide Poletti.

In 2022, I married Amala, a fellow academic pursuing her PhD in Political Science. We then moved to the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, for my first postdoctoral position, where I collaborated with Dr. Giuseppe Puglisi and Prof. Nicola Vittorio. Now, in 2024, I've made my way to sunny San Diego for my current postdoctoral role at the University of California, working alongside the distinguished Prof. Brian Keating.