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William Ortolá Leonard
Pronouns: He/him/his
CONTACT INFORMATION
EMAIL: wortola@ufl.edu
OFFICE: NPB, 2109
OVERVIEW
Originally from Catadau, Valencia (Spain) I discovered my passion for physics at an early age while doing an assignment for my spanish class. After turning 15 years old and with dreams of becoming a scientist, my family and I moved to Miami where I attended Hialeah Senior High School and graduated in 2016. In 2018, I graduated from the Honors College at Miami Dade College with an A.A. in Physics. Later, I transferred to the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where I obtain two B.S. in Physics and Mathematics in 2020. Currently, I am a graduate student at the University of Florida since 2021, where I am working in the field of cosmology hoping to shine some light on the mysterious accelerated expansion of the universe. I am also a John Templeton Foundation fellow (TEX) and a NSF GRFP fellow.
Education
M.S. Physics, University of Florida, 2022
B.S. Physics, B.S. Mathematics , University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2020
A.A. Physics, The Honors College Miami Dade College, 2018
Research Interests
My research lies at the interface between theory and experiment in the field of cosmology. The Universe is my laboratory and to explore its vastness I am a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) experiment through my research group at UF, led by Dr. Zachary Slepian. DESI is measuring the 3D position of roughly 40 million galaxies and to extract information from its data I make use of N-Point Correlation Functions (NPCFs). Specifically, I exploit the 4PCF, a measurement of the excess probability over random of finding four galaxies in a given tetrahedral configuration (triangular-base pyramids, with the four galaxies sitting at the vertices). In my free time, I love learning about alternative models to inflation (a model proposing an accelerated expansion of the universe, 10^-33 second after the big bang to explain the extremely homogenous and isotropic Universe we see during our observations) and new ways of testing parity violation in the distributions of galaxies.
Cosmology
Higher-Order Correlation Functions
Large-Scale Structures of the Universe
Advisor: Zachary Slepian
Miscellaneous
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