## Welcome

As a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Edinburgh, I specialise in testing gravity on ten to hundreds of megaparsecs with spectroscopic redshift surveys; I've had the pleasure of leading a VIPERS redshift-space distortions working group to this end. You may read more about my work in the following. Please email me: mjw@roe.ac.uk if you have any questions.

### VIPERS

I have proven the expansion history and linear growth rate predicted by General Relativity to be consistent with the VIPERS PDR-2 power spectrum, when a Planck (2015) cosmology is assumed. Moreover, we investigated the effect of density weighting prior to the analysis, which would amplify signatures of shielded modified gravity; the validity of perturbation theory is extended as a bonus.

### ACT

I, together with B. Sherwin, C. Hill and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope team made the first detection of non-Gaussianity of the cosmic microwave background due to the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. Using the observed skewness, we placed an independent constraint on the root-mean-square density fluctuation once smoothed on 8$h^{-1}$Mpc scales.

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The dominant systematic of the large-scale power spectrum is due to the survey mask. I've developed a 1000-10,000x faster method to account for this, which forms the basis of my own analysis and that of BOSS DR12.

### Thesis

My thesis was supervised by J. Peacock, A. Taylor and S. de la Torre; S. Cole and A. Lawrence were my opponents during the viva.