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Hyungsuk Tak

Hyungsuk Tak — Assistant Professor — Faculty
Office: 326 Osmond Laboratory
Address: 326 Thomas building University Park, PA 16802 US
hvt5139@psu.edu
+1 814 865 1348
Hyungsuk Tak
Astroinformatics Astrostatistics CTOC

Hyungsuk (Tak) Tak is an Assistant Professor of Statistics, Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State.

Tak received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard University in 2016. He received his A.M. in Statistics from Harvard University in 2012, and a B.A. in Statistics from Korea University in 2009.

In preparation for the era of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), Tak works closely with astronomers and astrophysicists to analyze astronomical time series and imaging data, developing practically motivated data analytic tools. Specifically, his research interests are (i) statistical challenges in astronomical data analysis (heteroscedasticity, outliers, irregularly-spaced time series, (ii) time delay cosmography for the Hubble constant estimation, (iii) statistical computation (data augmentation/missing data/Markov chain Monte Carlo), and (iv) Bayesian hierarchical modeling with frequency coverage evaluation.

Publications
  1. Hyungsuk Tak, Justin Ellis, Sujit Ghosh “Robust and Accurate Inference via a Mixture of Gaussian and Student’s t Errors.” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 28 2 (2019) doi:10.1080/10618600.2018.1537925
  2. Hyungsuk Tak, Sujit Ghosh, Justin Ellis “How proper are Bayesian models in the astronomical literature?.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 481 1 (2018) doi:10.1093/mnras/sty2326
  3. Hyungsuk Tak, Xiao-Li Meng, David Dyk “A Repelling–Attracting Metropolis Algorithm for Multimodality.” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 27 3 (2018) doi:10.1080/10618600.2017.1415911
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.