Harry Flexner Desmond Portrait

Dr Harry Desmond

Biography

I joined the ICG as a Senior Research Fellow in January 2022, supported by a Royal Society URF. Before that I was a McWilliams Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, and before that a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, Oxford. I obtained my PhD from Stanford University in 2017.

Research interests

I am interested primarily in developing new tests of the standard model of cosmology (gravity and/or dark sector physics) using astrophysical objects, mainly galaxies and stars. My work ranges from pure theory, through N-body and hydrodynamical simulations to statistical data analysis. I am also interested in galaxy formation and how best to characterise the relation between galaxies and their host dark matter halos.

Research outputs

2025

Challenges to a sharp change in G as a solution to the Hubble tension

Banik, I., Desmond, H., Samaras, N.

1 May 2025, In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 539, 2, p. 1553-1561, 9p.

2024

Evaluating the variance of individual halo properties in constrained cosmological simulations

Desmond, H., Devriendt, J., Slyz, A., Stiskalek, R.

1 Nov 2024, In: MNRAS. 534, 4, 13p.

Symmetry in Hyper Suprime-Cam galaxy spin directions

Desmond, H., Stiskalek, R.

1 Nov 2024, In: Research Notes of the AAS. 8, 11, 3p., 281

No evidence for anisotropy in galaxy spin directions

Desmond, H., Patel, D.

3 Oct 2024, In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 534, 2, p. 1553–1560, 8p.

Testing screened modified gravity with SDSS-IV-MaNGA

Desmond, H., Koyama, K., Landim, R. G., Penny, S.

1 Oct 2024, In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 534, 1, p. 349–360

SYREN-HALOFIT: A fast, interpretable, high-precision formula for the ΛCDM nonlinear matter power spectrum

Bartlett, D. J., Desmond, H., Ferreira, P. G., Wandelt, B. D., Zennaro, M.

5 Jun 2024, In: Astronomy and Astrophysics. 686, 11p., A150

A precise symbolic emulator of the linear matter power spectrum

Alonso, D., Bartlett, D. J., Burlacu, B., Desmond, H., Ferreira, P. G., Kammerer, L., Kronberger, G., Wandelt, B. D., Zennaro, M.

1 Jun 2024, In: Astronomy and Astrophysics. 686, 9p., A209

On the tension between the radial acceleration relation and Solar system quadrupole in modified gravity MOND

Desmond, H., Famaey, B., Hees, A.

1 May 2024, In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 530, 2, p. 1781-1795, 15p.

Optimal inflationary potentials

Bartlett, D. J., Desmond, H., Ferreira, P. G., Sousa, T.

15 Apr 2024, In: Physical Review D. 109, 8, 15p., 083524

View all my research outputs