Cambridge academic honoured in leading cosmology award
(Originally published by the University of Cambridge)
June 3, 2011
Professor George Efstathiou, Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in Cambridge, is one of four astronomers who have won this year’s Gruber Cosmology Prize.
The Gruber International Prize Program honours individuals in the fields of cosmology, genetics, justice and women’s rights, whose groundbreaking work provides new models that inspire and enable fundamental shifts in knowledge and culture.
Professor Efstathiou, pictured, will share the $500,000 prize with Professor Marc Davis of the University of California at Berkley, Carlos Frenk, Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, and Simon White, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.
The citation for the prize recognises the astronomers – nicknamed the Gang of Four by colleagues and peers – for “their pioneering use of numerical simulations to model and interpret the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe”.
The Gang of Four’s work, it continues, has “transformed the way we conceive and visualise the growth of structure in the universe”.
Previous winners of the award have included Lord Rees, Master of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, and Professor Rob Kennicutt, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy, and Director of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge.