Professor George Efstathiou FRS, University of Cambridge, UK
Biography
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 served as Director of the Institute of Astronomy until 2008 and was the first appointed 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, 1990 Vainu Bappu Prize of the Astronomical Society of India, 1994 Astrophysics Prize of the Bodossaki Foundation, 2005 American Institute of Physics Heineman Prize for Astronomy (shared with his long-term collaborator Simon White), 2011 Gruber Prize in Cosmology (shared with Carlos Frenk, Marc Davis and Simon White) and more recently the 2013 Nemitsas Prize in Physics. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1994.
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 background to unprecedented precision.