George Efstathiou F.R.S.

Background

George Efstathiou holds the Professor of Astrophysics (1909) at the University of Cambridge. He received his B.A. in Physics from Keble College, Oxford University in 1976, and his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Durham University in 1979. His first postdoctoral appointment was at the Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley. He spent the next eight years at the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge, beginning as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant and eventually becoming Assistant Director of Research. In 1988, Efstathiou was appointed to the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford University, where he served as Head of Astrophysics until 1994. He returned to Cambridge in 1997 and has served as Director of the Institute of Astronomy since 2004. He was appointed as the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge from 2008 - 2013.

Professor Efstathiou has received several prizes for his research including the 1990 Maxwell Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics, the 1990 Vainu Bappu Prize of the Astronomical Society of India, the 1994 Astrophysics Prize of the Bodossaki Foundation, the 2005 American Institute of Physics Heineman Prize for Astronomy (shared with his long-term collaborator Simon White), 2011 the Gruber Cosmology Prize (jointly awarded with Marc Davis, Carlos Frenk and Simon White) and the 2013 Nemitsas Prize in Physics.

Professor Efstathiou has wide interests in theoretical and observational cosmology and has contributed to studies of large-scale structure in the Universe, galaxy formation, dark energy and the cosmic microwave background radiation. He is a member of the Science Team for the European Space Agency Planck Satellite, launched in May 2009, which is mapping the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave backround to unprecedented precision.