George Efstathiou

George Petros Efstathiou ( born September 2, 1955 in London ) is a British astrophysicist.

Life and work

Efstathiou studied from 1973 at the University of Oxford ( BA in Physics 1976) and the University of Durham, where he became in 1979 a Ph.D. in astronomy. 1979/80 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Cambridge. From 1988 he was professor of astronomy at Savilian Oxford University and from 1988 to 1994 Head of Astrophysics at Oxford. From 1997 he was professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge from 2004 to 2008 and Director of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. From 2008 he is director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in Cambridge.

Efstathious studies of the impact (cold ) dark matter on structure formation in the early universe date back to 1980. First numerical simulations, he published in 1981, the first calculations of the CMB anisotropies in the CDM (cold dark matter ) scenario in 1984., Followed by more detailed studies with Carlos Frenk, Marc Davis and Simon White. In 1990 he found from the analysis of data from the APM Galaxy Survey first evidence inconsistencies of a CDM scenario with vanishing cosmological constant. Efstathiou was also the 2dFGRS ( 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey) involved ( which was based on the APM Galaxy Survey and was conducted between 1997 and 2001 by the Australian Astronomical Observatory ), which is also a non-vanishing cosmological constant confirmed. Efstathiou is also involved in a leading position at the Planck space telescope mission of ESA.

In 1990 he was awarded the Maxwell Medal and 2005 with Simon White the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics. In 2011 he was awarded the Gruber Prize for Cosmology for Development of Cold Dark Matter models of the early universe with Marc Davis, Carlos Frenk and Simon White. In 1994 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society (1983 to 2010).