Richard Stiskalek

I hold a BSc from the University of Glasgow and an MSc from LMU Munich. During my DPhil at Balliol College, Oxford, I was a visiting researcher in Paris and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Flatiron Institute. I am now a Career Development Research Fellow at St John's and a Hintze Prize Fellow.

Teaching

I teach the second-year A1 Thermal Physics tutorials at St John's. I have previously tutored the fourth-year MPhys C1 Astrophysics option and demonstrated computational astrophysics in the third-year practical course. I also supervise undergraduate and master's research projects in cosmology, large-scale structure and galaxy formation.

My research focuses on the local Universe, the region within roughly a billion light-years of the Milky Way, which we can map in the most detail. I study the clustering and peculiar velocities of its galaxies and reconstruct the initial conditions from which they formed, building "digital twins" that turn our cosmic neighbourhood into a precision laboratory for cosmology and astrophysics. Among other applications, I use these to model the distance ladder and measure the Hubble constant, the present-day expansion rate of the Universe. Local measurements disagree with those inferred from the early Universe, a discrepancy known as the Hubble tension that points either to new physics or to unrecognised systematics. I also combine semi-analytic models of galaxy formation with cosmological rescaling of existing simulations to cheaply probe how galaxy populations depend on the cosmological parameters.

Awards and distinctions

Hintze Prize Fellowship in Astrophysics (Cosmology), University of Oxford (2026)

Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute (2025)

Snell Exhibition, Balliol College, Oxford (2022–2026)

DAAD Study Scholarship, German Academic Exchange Service (2021–2022)

Recent publications

• R. Stiskalek, H. Desmond, E. Tsaprazi, A. Heavens, G. Lavaux, S. McAlpine, J. Jasche, "1.8 per cent measurement of H0 from Cepheids alone", MNRAS 546 (2026)
  https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf2260
• R. Stiskalek, A. G. Riess, H. Desmond, G. Lavaux, D. Scolnic, "Forward-modelling Milky Way Cepheids: selection effects and physical priors in the Gaia–HST calibration", MNRAS 550 (2026)
  https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1272
• R. Stiskalek, H. Desmond, J. Devriendt, A. Slyz, G. Lavaux, M. J. Hudson, D. J. Bartlett, H. M. Courtois, "The Velocity Field Olympics: assessing velocity field reconstructions with direct distance tracers", MNRAS 545 (2026)
  https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf1960
• R. Stiskalek, L. A. Perez, S. Genel, R. S. Somerville, R. E. Angulo, S. Contreras, "Learning the Universe with cosmological rescaling of merger trees and semianalytic galaxy formation models", ApJ 1007 (2026)
  https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10024