Dr Payel Das is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Astrophysics Group at the University of Surrey. She holds a PhD in Astrophysics from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany. After completing her doctorate, she worked at University College London on energy-efficient building design, before returning to astrophysics as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. At Surrey she leads the GLEAM project, investigating how the chemical and dynamical signatures of stars can be used to reconstruct galaxy evolutionary histories and the distribution of dark matter.

Her research combines equilibrium dynamical modelling, large survey datasets, machine learning, and novel interdisciplinary methods (including evolutionary biology inspired techniques) to make sense of high-dimensional observations in nearby galaxies. Recent work includes detailed studies of the Milky Way’s metal-poor stellar populations and the structure of its outer disc.