Professor Benjamin Wandelt and Dr Elsa Teixeira gave an online seminar on 6 October 2023 to examine our present understanding of how the Universe evolved from the big bang to its current state, together with some open problems in this understanding.
World Space Week is observed internationally as a celebration of science and technology and their contribution to the betterment of the human condition through a greater understanding of space, its exploration, and our place in the Universe. CosmoVerse is a network of researchers who work on understanding the nature of the Universe. The network is centered in Europe but has a global reach.
Seminar Videos
CosmoVerse Space Week High School Seminar
Part 1: Elsa Teixeira
Mrs Elsa Teixeira is currently finishing her PhD at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, at the University of Sheffield. She is originally from Lisbon, where she did her undergraduate in Theoretical Physics and her masters degree in Astrophysics and Cosmology, both at the University of Lisbon (FCUL).
During her MSc she was affiliated with the Portuguese Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA), where she remained for one additional year with a research scholarship. She then moved to Sheffield to start her PhD in 2019 and she is now about to move to Montpellier as a postdoctoral researcher at CNRS, based at the Laboratoire Univers et Particules de Montpellier (LUPM).
Her research revolve mainly about understanding the nature of the dark sector of the Universe, that is the dark matter and dark energy that are needed in the standard model of cosmology but which still lack direct detection and a fundamental description.
She is a theorist, in the sense that she doesn’t work directly on experiments, but on interpreting and analysing processed data. She also works for Euclid, a satellite from the European Space Agency, which was just launched and will probe the dark sector.
CosmoVerse Space Week High School Seminar
Part 2: Benjamin Wandelt
Professor Benjamin D. Wandelt researches and teaches in the fields of Cosmology, Physics, Astronomy, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and Computing.
Professor Wandelt (Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College, London) held early career research fellowships at the Theoretical Astrophysics Centre (Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen and at the Department of Physics at Princeton University. In 2001, he became assistant professor in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2010 he was awarded the International Chair of Theoretical Cosmology at Sorbonne University and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. In 2011 he was the founding co-director of the Institut Lagrange de Paris in cosmology, astro-particle, and theoretical physics and was named director in 2014. Professor Wandelt has held long-term visiting faculty positions at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics; Caltech; Princeton University; the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton; and NYU; and joined the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City in 2017.
Professor Wandelt’s research in theoretical, computational, and statistical astrophysics connects fundamental physics and cosmology with astronomical data ranging from stars to the largest scales accessible to observations. He has won multiple awards in several countries such as the Xerox award, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel prize, the Sofja Kovalevskaja award, and a senior Excellence Chair of the Agence Nationale de Recherche. He co-led the Primordial Non-Gaussianity analysis for ESA’s Planck mission and won multiple prizes as a Planck Scientist and core team member, including the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015 and Fellow of the International Association of Astrostatisticians in 2019. He is the creator of Cosmology@Home, a world-wide participatory computing platform with over 60,000 members.