BENJAMIN D. WANDELT ELECTED FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
Benjamin D. Wandelt, Professor of Theoretical Cosmology at Pierre and Marie Curie University (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, UPMC), and Director of the Lagrange Institute was named 2015 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in recognition of his outstanding contributions to physics.
Election as an APS Fellow is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one's professional peers. Each year, elected fellows number no more than one-half percent of APS membership. APS represents over 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and throughout the world.
The citation from APS recognizes Ben Wandelt “for a leading role in the development of the algorithms and tools used in the analysis and interpretation of cosmic microwave background data and for his development of novel approaches to cosmological analyses.”
Ben Wandelt’s research focuses on connecting fundamental physics and cosmology with astronomical data on scales ranging from the inner parts of galaxies to the largest scales accessible to observations. He has been recognized by international awards such as the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel prize and the Sofja Kovalevskaja award, and was awarded a senior Excellence Chair by the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de Recherche) in 2011. As a leading proponent of the new discipline of astrostatistics, he serves on the Council of the International Astrostatistics Association. He is also the creator of Cosmology@Home, a worldwide participatory computing platform with over 15,000 members.
Ben Wandelt earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the Imperial College, London. After holding research positions at the Theoretical Astrophysics Center in Copenhagen, and at the Department of Physics, Princeton University, 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 UPMC at the “Institut d’astrophysique de Paris” (IAP). Since 2014 he serves as the director of the Lagrange Institute, in Paris.
Web writing: Valérie de Lapparent
Layout and iconography: Jean Mouette
October 2015