About Me

Hi, I’m Muntazir Abidi. I’m originally from Karachi, Pakistan, but currently live in Geneva, Switzerland.

I completed my undergraduate studies in Physics (with a minor in Electrical Engineering) at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan, in 2012. After my undergraduate I spent one year from 2012 to 2013 at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy, to study for a Postgraduate Diploma in High Energy Physics. From 2013 to 2015, I taught physics and mathematics at the Karachi Institute of Technology and Entrepreneurship and at the Institute of Business Administration in Pakistan.

In 2015, I went to the  University of Cambridge, UK, to do a Master of Advanced Study in Applied Mathematics. I was affiliated with St Edmunds College.

In 2016, I started a PhD in Cosmology at the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, University of Cambridge, under Dr Tobias Baldauf and Dr Blake Sherwin. My PhD thesis title is “Higher Order Couplings in the Clustering of Biased Tracers of the Large-Scale Structure”.

More recently, in November 2020, I joined the  University of Geneva as a Post-doctoral Researcher funded by a European Research Council grant to work with Prof. Camille Bonvin on testing gravity using galaxy surveys. I am also collaborating with Prof. Shirley Ho’s group on machine learning applications in Cosmology. I was invited as a short-term researcher by the Cosmology X Data Science group at the Flatiron Institute (by Simons Foundation) in 2020.

Besides my interests in cosmology, I am also passionate about finance and entrepreneurship. I have been involved in two entrepreneurial projects: First, I have been providing quantitative consultancy to a quantitative finance startup based in Karachi, Pakistan. We use mathematical modelling and data analytics to create algorithms to trade securities and financial instruments on the Pakistan Stock Exchange. Second, in 2019, I co-founded a life sciences startup, Cambridge Chromatin Technologies, with Khayam Javed, a research scientist at Prof. Sir John Gurdon’s group at the University of Cambridge. We are developing a patentable technology to find therapeutic targets for diseases such as cancer by combining proteomics and machine learning.