A scalable approach to modelling gravitational microlensing events for exoplanet demographics in the WFIRST era

One of the key science goals of NASA's upcoming space mission WFIRST (Wide Field
Infrared Space Telescope) is determining the demographics of cool exoplanets by means of
gravitational microlensing. Current approaches to discovering and modeling microlensing
events do not scale to data volumes expected to come from WFIRST, and also the data
volumes from next generation ground based surveys. Besides the increasing data volume,
questions such as how to determine the evidence for a planet in the presence of photometric
noise and how to deal with highly nonlinear and degenerate parameter spaces remain
unanswered. Answering those questions is the goal of my PhD project.