Prakhar Bansal

Prakhar Bansal

Physics PhD at the University of Michigan
Member: DESI Collaboration

GitHub LinkedIn Inspire HEP

About Me

Hey there! I'm Prakhar, a second-year Physics Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I work with my supervisor, Dragan Huterer within the Michigan Cosmology Group. I grew up in Bharatpur, which is small town in the Eastern part of the state of Rajasthan in India. After completing my Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, I moved to the United States for my PhD. I am an avid stargazer, and also love writing and performing jokes around day to day happenings in the world. For the comedy savants reading this, the genre falls under the name of "Topical Political Comedy"

I’m into cosmology, especially the large-scale structure of the universe and the mysterious stuff we call dark energy. I'm part of the DESI collaboration, helping map the cosmos using light from millions of galaxies. It’s a cool mix of theory, data, and trying to figure out how the universe works on the biggest scales. Outside of research, I like finding creative ways to share science, through writing, visualizations, or just chatting about the cosmos. Feel free to look around and see what I’m up to!

Recent Updates

Research

Although I'm interested in all things cosmology, my PhD is mainly focussed on understanding the nature of Dark Energy, LSS, Modified Gravity, full shape analysis from Power Spectrum and Bispectrum. Below I have tried to classify my research into a few broader topics. Each tile takes you to a page where I have described the research in more detail, along with a quick (hopefully beginner friendly) background of the research topic.

Cosmological Tensions

Looking into the specific features in recent data which might be driving the Hubble Tension and the evidence for DDE. Click to know more!

Full Shape Analysis

Developed a pipeline to perform joint Power Spectrum and Bispectrum fits using the clustering data, combining EFT and phenomenological approaches to model the los small scales better to derive tighter parameter constraints. Click to know more!

Baryon Accoustic Oscillations

Performed the validation checks by including hexadecapole (P4) measurements in the fits for DESI DR2 BAO key paper

Modified Gravity

Contributing to the pipeline development for DESI DR2 Modified Gravity analysis. Click to know more!

CMB Compression

Worked on an optimal compression of the computation heavy CMB likelihood into a few parameters suitable for Dark Energy constraints. Click to know more!

21 cm Cosmology

Derived constraints on Coulomb-like DM interaction using the SARAS3 global 21cm data

Academic Resources

CV

Last updated: Feb 2026

Publications

Inspire HEP

Talks

Here are slides from some of the talks I gave recently at various conferences/meetings

Get in touch

If you find my work interesting and want to discuss further or have any questions, feel free to put them here. I'm usually much more active on slack, so feel free to hit me up on slack if we are in a common channel. Else, this form would also work, I'll try to answer within a week (No promises though :))