Cosmology is about to receive a large influx of a variety of observational data, providing a promising avenue for addressing some of the most critical questions in fundamental physics. In this seminar, I will give a brief introduction to some of the concepts used in standard cosmological data analysis.I will then discuss some recent work on developing more optimal methods of extracting cosmological information from data using differentiable forward models, with the goal of maximizing the scientific potential of cosmological surveys.