Ben Wandelt, Ph.D.

Professor Benjamin Wandelt received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College, London. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Theoretical Astrophysics Center in Copenhagen from 1997 to 1999, as a research associate at the Department of Physics, Princeton University, from 1999 to 2001. He joined the faculty of the Departments of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and received tenure in 2006. In January 2010 he was awarded the International Chair of Theoretical Cosmology at Pierre and Marie Curie University (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, UPMC) and the Institute for Astrophysics in Paris (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, IAP). He was named director of the Lagrange Institute in May 2014.

Professor Wandelt’s research connects fundamental physics and cosmology with astronomical data on scales ranging from the inner halos of galaxies to the largest scales accessible to observations. He is a Planck Scientist and core team member of ESA’s Planck mission, as well as a member of the Euclid mission. He serves on the Council of the International Astrostatistics Association. He has been recognized by international awards such as the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel prize and the Sofja Kovalevskaja award, was awarded a senior Excellence Chair by the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de Recherche) in 2011, and named Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015. He is also the creator of Cosmology@Home, a world-wide participatory computing platform with over 60,000 members.

See a list of publications at arxiv.