Astrostatistician and scientific software developer working on Bayesian reasoning, machine learning, astronomical surveys, galaxy evolution, and applied mathematics.

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• Senior Lecturer in Astrophysics and Astrostatistics, University of Hertfordshire.
• Founder and Co-Chair, Cosmostatistics Initiative (COIN).
• Chair, Astrostatistics Interest Group of the International Statistical Institute.
• Visiting Scholar, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
• Adjunct Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

• capivara - spectral-based segmentation for IFU data cubes, MNRAS 539(4), 3166 (2025).
• SAGUI - SED-based segmentation of multi-band galaxy images.
• SpectralUnmix - regularized non-negative matrix factorization for spectral data.
• PowerSpectR - radial power-spectrum estimation for imaging data.
• GalMOSS - GPU-accelerated galaxy surface-brightness fitting.
• qrpca - QR-based PCA, A&C 41, 100633 (2022).

• Bayesian Models for Astrophysical Data (Cambridge University Press, 2017), with Joseph M. Hilbe and Emille E. O. Ishida. PROSE Award winner.
• Twenty-First-Century Statistical and Computational Challenges in Astrophysics (Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, 2021).
• A Brief History of Inference in Astronomy (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 2025).
• Capivara: a spectral-based segmentation method for IFU data cubes (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2025).
• SAGUI: SED-based Segmentation of Multi-band Galaxy Images (arXiv, 2026).

Astrostatistics, likelihood-free inference, hierarchical Bayesian modelling, machine learning for surveys, galaxy evolution, IFU spectroscopy, Galactic structure, time-domain astronomy, and open scientific software.

My academic CV and full publication list are maintained at rafaelsdesouza.github.io.