Testing general relativity with cosmology

• Professor Pedro Ferreira, University of Oxford, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Pedro G Ferreira is a Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Tutorial Fellow of Oriel College. He has held research appointments at the University of California at Berkeley and CERN. He is also associated faculty at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town. His fields of interest are General Relativity, the Early Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background, and Cosmological Data in general. He wrote one of the first papers on the growth of structure in quintessence, he was on the science team that showed the Universe was flat with the Boomerang and Maxima data, and he was one of the first people to show the impact of modified gravity models in large scale structure. He maintains an active involvement in a number of experiments, namely QUIET and FASTSOUND on FMOS and is involved in proposals for the satellite missions EUCLID and CORE. Professor Ferreira has published a book, State of the Universe (W&N -2006) and is working on a new book on the history of relativity, to be published in Spring 2013. 

• Professor Rachel Bean, Cornell University, USA

Rachel Bean is an Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University, where she has been on the faculty since 2005. From 2002-2005 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. She has a MSc (1999) and PhD (2002) in physics from Imperial College, London and a BA Honours in physics (1995) from Cambridge University. Her research in cosmology is at the interface between particle physics, astrophysics theory and astronomical observation. Her work centers on how current and future large scale structure and cosmic microwave background observations can be used to decipher the nature of cosmic inflation, dark matter and dark energy. In 2008, she was one of 11 scientists in the US awarded the Research Corporation’s Cottrell Scholar Award for excellence in research and teaching. In 2010, she was recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

• Professor Andrew Taylor, University of Edinburgh, UK

Andy Taylor is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, based at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. He was awarded a BSc in Manchester and his PhD at Queen Mary College, London. In 1992 he moved to Edinburgh to the Institute for Astronomy where he becoming Professor of Astrophysics in 2007. He is an Editor of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Professor Taylor has interests in both theoretical and observational Cosmology, in particular dark matter and dark energy, weak gravitational lensing, the cosmic microwave background, galaxy redshift surveys and the early Universe. His contributions to Cosmology include distinguishing between competing cosmological models of the Universe and measuring their properties, introducing 3-D Weak Gravitational Lensing, and developing theories of the early Universe and Dark Energy. He led the analysis of the QUAD Cosmic Microwave Background Telescope making the first detailed study of the polarization field from the CMB. He currently leads the Weak Gravitational Lensing analysis for the European Euclid satellite mission to probe Dark Energy and Dark Matter, and co-leads the Cosmological Weak Lensing analysis for the Pan-STARRS telescope.  

• Professor Pedro Ferreira, University of Oxford, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Pedro G Ferreira is a Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Tutorial Fellow of Oriel College. He has held research appointments at the University of California at Berkeley and CERN. He is also associated faculty at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town. His fields of interest are General Relativity, the Early Universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background, and Cosmological Data in general. He wrote one of the first papers on the growth of structure in quintessence, he was on the science team that showed the Universe was flat with the Boomerang and Maxima data, and he was one of the first people to show the impact of modified gravity models in large scale structure. He maintains an active involvement in a number of experiments, namely QUIET and FASTSOUND on FMOS and is involved in proposals for the satellite missions EUCLID and CORE. Professor Ferreira has published a book, State of the Universe (W&N -2006) and is working on a new book on the history of relativity, to be published in Spring 2013. 

• Professor Rachel Bean, Cornell University, USA

Rachel Bean is an Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University, where she has been on the faculty since 2005. From 2002-2005 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. She has a MSc (1999) and PhD (2002) in physics from Imperial College, London and a BA Honours in physics (1995) from Cambridge University. Her research in cosmology is at the interface between particle physics, astrophysics theory and astronomical observation. Her work centers on how current and future large scale structure and cosmic microwave background observations can be used to decipher the nature of cosmic inflation, dark matter and dark energy. In 2008, she was one of 11 scientists in the US awarded the Research Corporation’s Cottrell Scholar Award for excellence in research and teaching. In 2010, she was recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

• Professor Edmund Bertschinger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Edmund Bertschinger is Professor and Department Head of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a theoretical astrophysicist whose research focuses on cosmology, gravitation, and relativistic astrophysics. In addition, he prizes teaching, mentoring, and the broadening of the participation and success of women in science and engineering.

Bertschinger received his BS in physics from Caltech in 1979 and his PhD in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University in 1984. Following postdoctoral positions at the University of Virginia and at UC Berkeley, he joined the MIT faculty in 1986. From 2002-2007 he served as Astrophysics Division Head before becoming Physics Department Head. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Alfred P Sloan Research Fellowship, and Helen B Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society. 

• Dr Constantinos Skordis, University of Nottingham, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Constantinos Skordis is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. His research interests lie in all aspects of cosmology and of gravitational theory and phenomenology. In the more recent years, he has focused on non-Einsteinian theories that deviate from General Relativity at low curvatures. He has recently developed a framework for testing gravitational theories with cosmological observations.

Skordis was born in Cyprus (1975). He obtained his BSc degree in Physics with Theoretical Physics at Imperial College in London (1998) and subsequently joined the newly formed cosmology group at UC Davis led by Andy Albrecht. He finished his PhD on models of dark energy and their observational consequences under Albrecht’s supervision in 2002. Skordis has held postdoctoral positions in Oxford, Perimeter Institute and Nottingham. 

• Dr Thomas Kitching, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Thomas Kitching is a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow working at the University of Edinburgh. His primary research interest is in using gravitational lensing to learn about dark energy and dark matter. Dr Kitching plays an active role in the CFHTLenS, Pan-STARRS, HALO and Euclid gravitational lensing surveys. He is PI of the gravitational lensing simulations challenge GREAT10. 

• Professor Eric Linder, University of California at Berkeley, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Eric Linder is Director of the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Deputy Director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, as well as Distinguished Professor at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea, the world's largest women's university, and a member of Korea's World Class University program. He has taught at the University of London and Stanford University and is author of the textbook "First Principles of Cosmology". Dr Linder also serves as Shapley Lecturer for the American Astronomical Society and on the Contemporary Physics Education Project, which aims to educate high school and general audiences about modern physics. 

• Professor Jean-Philippe Uzan, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS, France
• Audio recording (mp3)

Jean-Philippe Uzan has obtained his PhD from Paris XI university in 1998 and was a student of Nathalie Deruelle. From 1998 to 1999 he was a postdoc at Geneva university and was then hired by the CNRS in 1999, where he is now directeur de recherche and worked at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris and is also an associate researcher of Cape Town university. His main works concern the tests of the underlying hypothesis of the standard cosmological model. It includes study of the topology of the universe, tests of general relativity on astrophysical scales (including test of the equivalence principle using fundamental constants) and tests of the Copernican principle and of the isotropy of our universe. He has also worked on scalart-tensor theories, as well as on inflation and CMB theory, focusing mostly on non-Gaussianity.

He has been teaching physics at the Ecole des Mines de Paris and Cosmology at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris.

He has co-authored the monography "Primordial cosmology" (OUP) and written several popular science books, among which books for children. 

• Dr Fabian Schmidt, California Institute of Technology, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Fabian Schmidt is a Moore Postdoctoral Fellow at the Theoretical Astrophysics (TAPIR) group at Caltech. His main current research interests are testing Einsteinian and modified gravity models on cosmological scales, and probing the initial conditions of the Universe with large scale structure. His work ranges from theoretical studies to comparisons of model predictions with observational data. A graduate of Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany in 2005, Schmidt went on to graduate studies in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He obtained his PhD in 2009.

• Dr Ruth Durrer, University of Geneva, Switzerland
• Audio recording (mp3)

Ruth Durrer is head of the Department of Theoretical Pysics at Geneva University. Her research covers different areas in cosmology: inflation and the early universe, the cosmic microwave background, cosmological magnetic fields, gravitational waves and dark energy. She has obtained her PhD from Zurich University in 1988 and spent her post-doc years in Cambridge (UK) and Princeton (USA). Since 1995 she is full professor at the University of Geneva. 

• Dr Will Percival, University of Portsmouth, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Will Percival is currently a Reader in Cosmology at the University of Portsmouth. He obtained his PhD from Oxford in 1999, and moved to the University of Edinburgh where he spent 6 years as a postdoctoral research assistant. He moved to Portsmouth in 2005, first as a lecturer and then as a Reader from 2008. He has authored over 60 papers on astronomical topics, including influential work on using galaxy surveys to measure the expansion history of our Universe. For his research on cosmological structure formation, he was awarded a 2007 Philip Leverhulme prize, and a 2008 Royal Astronomical Society Fowler prize. In 2007 he won a European Research Council starting grant in the first round of these awards. 

• Professor Jacob Bekenstein, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem
• Audio recording (mp3)

Jacob Bekenstein, a native of Mexico City (1947), received his PhD (1972) in physics from Princeton University, and was thereafter a postdoc at the Center for Relativity in Austin, Texas. He moved in 1974 to the Ben Gurion University in Israel, where he became full professor in 1978, and the Arnow Professor of Astrophysics in 1983.

In 1990 he relocated to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he has been the Polak Professor of Theoretical Physics since 1993. A member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, of the World Jewish Academy of Sciences, and of the International Astronomical Union, Bekenstein is a laureate of the Rothschild prize and of the Israel National Prize. His scientific interests include gravitational theory, black hole physics, relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, galactic dynamics, and the physical aspects of information theory. 

• Professor Glenn Starkman, Case Western Reserve University, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Glenn Starkman, PhD, is Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, Director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics, and Director of the Institute for the Science of Origins at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio. After completing his Bachelor’s degree in Math and Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, he received his PhD in Physics from Stanford University under the supervision of Savas Dimopoulos. Following postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, where he was a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Scholar, he took up a faculty position at CWRU. Glenn is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Royal Astronomical Society. He spent 2003/4 as a Scientific Associate of CERN and 2005/6 as the inaugural Beecroft Fellow at Oxford University's Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and The Queen's College. In addition to numerous scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, Glenn is the author or co-author of several popular science articles.

• Professor Roy Maartens, University of Western Cape, South Africa & University of Portsmouth, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Roy Maartens did his PhD in Cosmology with George Ellis at the University of Cape Town. He then worked at Wits University in South Africa and Portsmouth University. He currently holds an SKA Research Chair at the University of the Western Cape, and is also a professor of cosmology at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG), Portsmouth. He was Director of the ICG from its inception in 2002 until 2010, during which time the ICG has become one of the leading cosmology research groups in the UK. Roy held a Senior Research Fellowship from the UK Particle Physics and Astrophysics Research Council, 2002-05. His interests include cosmological perturbations, dark energy, modified gravity, braneworld cosmology and cosmic magnetic fields. 

• Professor Pengjie Zhang, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Zhang’s research area is theoretical cosmology. He works on the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect, weak gravitational lensing, cosmological tests of general relativity and other topics on the large scale structure of the universe.

Professor Zhang obtained a BS from Peking University in 1997 and PhD from the University of Toronto in 2003. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Fermilab from 2003-2005 and then became a recipient of the one hundred talents program of the Chinese Academy of sciences and moved to Shanghai astronomical observatory as a professor. 

• Professor Bhuvnesh Jain, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Bhuvnesh Jain's research interests span theoretical models of structure formation in the universe, observations of gravitational lensing and interpretation of lensing data to carry out tests of dark energy and gravity. He co-coordinates the lensing efforts of the Dark Energy Survey and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescop. He also co-directs the Center for Particle Cosmology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Jain received a bachelor's degree at Princeton University and a PhD in Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

• Professor Robert Caldwell, Dartmouth College, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Robert Caldwell is a theoretical physicist specializing in cosmology. His research addresses basic questions about the universe: What is its history and future? What is its composition? What are the fundamental laws that determine its behavior?  He has been a professor at Dartmouth College since 2000. His undergraduate degree was from Washington University in St Louis, which was followed by graduate school at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and postdoctoral fellowships at Fermilab, Cambridge University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and currently serves as a Division Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters.