Digvijay (Jay) Wadekar

Jay Wadekar joined The University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2026 after previously serving as a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He was previously a member at the Institute of Advanced Study and completed his Ph.D. at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University in 2021, working closely with the Center for Computational Astrophysics cosmology group, a part of the Flatiron Institute, which is a research division of the Simons Foundation.

Wadekar is interested in a broad range of topics spanning agentic AI for physics, gravitational-waves, physics-informed machine learning, cosmology and astroparticle physics. He works to search for compact object mergers in the public LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA gravitational-wave data and also on applications of (interpretable) machine learning tools in various areas of astrophysics. His past research has involved cosmological pipelines of spectroscopic galaxy surveys and on gastrophysics studies targeted towards upcoming cosmic microwave background Sunyaev–Zeldovich surveys. He also has worked on dark matter phenomenology with low-mass pristine gas-rich dwarf galaxies, which are located outside the virial radius of their host.