Sigrid Passano Hellan

Hi! I'm Sigrid, a machine learning researcher interested in climate applications. I'm working as a senior researcher at NORCE Norwegian Research Centre, affiliated with the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research. I recently completed a PhD in Data Science at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

My research interests are Bayesian optimisation and constructing priors, as well as machine learning applications related to climate and the environment. In my PhD I applied Bayesian optimisation to air pollution monitoring: read more about my project here. My supervisors were Nigel Goddard and Christopher Lucas.

February 2025: I've joined the core team of Climate AI Nordics.
December 2024: I spoke to Tori Pedersen at the Bjerknes centre about my new job and about ML for weather prediction. Read what we talked about here.
October 2024: I attended the CATER summer school, where I gave a presentation on AI and weather prediction.
January 2024: I passed my viva (defended my PhD). Thank you to Joaquin Vanschoren and Arno Onken for an insightful and friendly viva!
October 2023: I'm very grateful to have won a grant from G-Research towards attending NeurIPS 2023 and presenting our workshop paper Data-driven Prior Learning for Bayesian Optimisation.
April 2023: I've recently completed an internship with AWS in Berlin, working on hyperparameter optimisation of ML models. I also contributed to GluonTS and Syne Tune.
December 2022: Tiffany Vlaar and I organised the Early-Career Researchers in Climate and ML Social at NeurIPS 2022.