Aadya Agrawal

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Prof. Gautham Narayan. I became a PhD candidate in September 2025. My research sits at the intersection of observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and time-domain astronomy.

My primary focus is on strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae — rare events where a background supernova is multiply imaged by an intervening galaxy cluster. These systems allow us to measure time delays between images and use them to independently constrain the Hubble constant (H₀), contributing to the ongoing effort to resolve the Hubble tension. I have been deeply involved in the analysis of SN H0pe, the first lensed SN Ia used for time-delay cosmography, and SN Encore, the first system with two multiply-imaged supernovae in the same host galaxy. Much of this work relies on JWST NIRCam data, where I perform difference imaging, photometry, and light curve modelling using BAYESN and SALT3.

I am also part of the SIRAH (Supernovae in the InfRAred Avec Hubble) project, which combines ground-based and HST observations for SN Ia cosmology. Additionally, I am interested in using machine learning and AI tools to identify and classify lensed supernovae in upcoming large survey datasets from LSST, Roman, and Euclid.

Before coming to UIUC, I completed my BS in Physics and Astronomy with High Honors at the University of Michigan, where I worked on X-ray source detection with eROSITA and Planck, and on integrating van der Waals heterostructures with photonic crystal nanobeams for my honors thesis.