Carlos Frenk

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Carlos Silvestre Frenk
CBE FRS
Carlos Frenk.jpg
Frenk in 2012
Born (1951-10-27) 27 October 1951 (age 73)
CitizenshipBritish, German and Mexican
Alma mater University of Mexico (BSc)
University of Cambridge (PhD)
Known for Navarro–Frenk–White profile
SpouseDr. Susan Frenk
Children2
Scientific career
Fields Astrophysics
Institutions Durham University
University of Sussex
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Berkeley
Thesis Globular clusters in the galaxy and in the Large Magellanic Cloud  (1981)
Doctoral advisor Bernard J. T. Jones
Doctoral students Ben Moore
Gillian Wilson
Website https://astro.dur.ac.uk/~csf/homepage/index.html

Carlos Silvestre Frenk CBE FRS (born 27 October 1951) is a Mexican-British cosmologist. [1] Frenk graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Cambridge, spending his early research career in the United States before settling in the United Kingdom. He joined Durham University in 1986 and has served as the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at the Durham University Department of Physics since 2001. [2]

Contents

Frenk's research has focused on galaxy formation, including his use of complex computer simulations to test theories on the origins and evolution of the universe. Alongside Marc Davis, George Efstathiou, and Simon White, he published a series of papers supporting the validity of the cold dark matter hypothesis. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004, among other recognitions. [2]

Early life and education

Carlos Frenk was born in Mexico City, Mexico, the eldest of six children. [3] His younger brother, Julio Frenk, is the former Mexican Secretary of Health. [4] His father, a German-Jewish physician, emigrated from Germany before World War II, while his mother was a Mexican–Spanish pianist. [5]

Frenk initially studied engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before switching to theoretical physics, earning his undergraduate degree in 1976. [1] [5] He graduated in 1976 and received the Gabino Barreda Medal. [6]

In 1976, he secured a British Council Fellowship and enrolled at the University of Cambridge to read Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, which he completed in 1977. He remained at Cambridge for doctoral studies under the supervision of Bernard J. T. Jones. [7] His doctoral research explored the properties of the Milky Way, theorizing that the galaxy was surrounded by embedded dark matter. [6]

At Cambridge, Frenk shifted his research focus to cosmology and met future collaborator Simon White. [8] [6]

Career and research

Early career, 1981–1986

Following Cambridge, Frenk worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he assisted Marc Davis in interpreting his research which was based on a galaxy survey conducted during Davis' previous appointment at Harvard. Davis, Frenk, and White collaborated on research into the early state of the universe through the use of computer modelling. [6]

During the late 1970s, the neutrino had emerged as a natural dark matter candidate. In 1983, Davis, Frenk, and White argued in a paper that dark matter could not be made of neutrinos because, even if neutrinos had the required mass, they would move too quickly to be able to clump together and form galaxies. [6] [9] [10]

In 1983, Frenk left Berkeley for nearby Santa Barbara. He was officially attached to the University of Sussex from 1984 to 1985. [3] During these two years, he divided his time between Britain and America, alternating between three months in Santa Barbara and three at the University of Sussex. [11]

Davis, Frenk, and White recruited George Efstathiou, a recent PhD from Durham University, to help them with computational implementation. [6] [12] With Efstathiou, the group worked on a series of papers, focusing on the supersymmetric theory that dark matter particles were cold. [6]

In 1985, Frenk and his collaborators published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal sharing the first simulations of cold dark matter, which supported the validity of the now widely accepted cold dark matter theory for the formation of galaxies and other cosmic structures. [13] [a] [3]

In 1986, Frenk was appointed Lecturer at Durham University, later being promoted to Reader in 1991 and then full Professor in 1993. [3] [6]

Frenk and White's theories faced significant competition from other dark matter theories in the 80s and 90s. [6] The most prominent competing theory was Modified Newtonian dynamics, proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1981. [14] Evidence from the Cosmic Background Explorer offered support for Frenk and White in 1993. [6]

In 1994, White was based at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and he and Frenk joined their institutions with other computational astronomers to form the Virgo Consortium, which had access to the supercomputing centre of the Max Planck Society in Garching and received funding from the UK government's 1994 High Performance Computing Initiative to build additional supercomputing resources. [6]

By the mid-1990s, the cold dark matter model had become widely accepted, and the focus of cosmological simulations shifted from the distribution of cold dark matter halos to the shapes of those halos. [13]

In 1996 and 1997, Frenk, White, and lead author Julio Navarro of the University of Arizona published results based on their analysis of halos from cold dark matter simulations. [13] This collaboration produced the Navarro-Frenk-White profile, a model profile for dark matter halos. The model describes the spatial mass distribution of dark matter within a halo, and is currently a widely used parametrization in the study of dark matter and galaxy formation. [13]

2001–present

The Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics Building, Durham University.jpg
The Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics

Following an endowment from Computacenter founder Peter Ogden in 2001, Frenk was named the inaugural Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University. [6] [b] He became the Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) upon its establishment in 2001, and held this post until 2020, at which point he was succeeded by Durham colleague Shaun Cole. [15] [16]

In 2005, as a member of the Virgo Consortium, Frenk was part of a team that produced the Millennium Run.

In 2020, Frenk was named a Clarivate Citation Laureate, which recognizes highly-cited research as "Nobel Class". [17] Along with Julio Navarro and Simon White, he was named a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 and 2021. [18] [c]

Personal life

Frenk is married to Dr. Susan Frenk, a lecturer in Spanish and Latin American literature and Principal of St Aidan's College. They have two sons. [11]

Frenk has an interest in architecture, which was inspired by his experience studying at the main campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a UNESCO World Heritage site. [20] He has reportedly taken an active role in the design process of new buildings at Durham University. [20]

Fellowships, awards and distinctions

Frenk was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2004. [21] He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to cosmology and the public dissemination of basic science. [22]

He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2014. [23]

Other awards include the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2006), the Daniel Chalonge Medal of the Paris Observatory (2007), the George Darwin Lectureship (2010), the Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (2010), the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2011), the Max Born Prize of the German Physical Society (2017), the Dirac Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (2020), and the Rumford Medal (2021). [24] [25] [3] [26] [27] [28]

In 2023, he was named an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, his postgraduate alma mater. [2] [29]

Media appearances

Frenk made his television debut in 1986 on an episode of the Australian series Beyond 2000 . He has made numerous appearances since then, including The Sky at Night for the BBC. [2] He has also appeared on BBC Radio on multiple occasions and was interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs , first broadcast in 2018. [5]

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Entitled The evolution of large-scale structure in a universe dominated by cold dark matter
  2. ↑ Ogden had previously studied Physics at Durham before entering the business world. [6]
  3. ↑ The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was eventually awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi. [19]

Citations

  1. 1 2 Anon (2017). "Frenk, Prof. Carlos Silvestre" . Who's Who (online Oxford University Press  ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U16471.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Carlos Frenk CV" (PDF). (90.3 KB)
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Carlos Frenk". Gruber Foundation . 2011. Retrieved 19 September 2025.
  4. ↑ Winward, Dylan (8 January 2025). "From public health policy to higher education: Julio Frenk becomes UCLA chancellor". Daily Bruin . Retrieved 2 May 2025.
  5. 1 2 3 "Professor Carlos Frenk". Desert Island Discs. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 28 September 2021.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 "The universe in a desktop". Scientific Computing World. Europa Science Ltd. 8 May 2008. Retrieved 27 April 2023.
  7. ↑ Carlos Frenk at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  8. ↑ Kibble, Bob (1997). Physics in Space. London: Heinemann. p. 78. ISBN   9780435688431.
  9. ↑ Pedro G. Ferreira (2006). The State of the Universe: A Primer in Modern Cosmology. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. 189. ISBN   9780297847403.
  10. ↑ White, Simon; Frenk, Carlos; Davis, Marc (November 1983). "Clustering in a neutrino-dominated universe". The Astrophysical Journal. 274: L1 –L5. Bibcode:1983ApJ...274L...1W. doi:10.1086/184139.
  11. 1 2 "A marriage of minds". Times Higher Education (THE) . 4 November 1994. Retrieved 24 April 2023.
  12. ↑ Dennis Overbye (1992). Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe. New York: Harper Perennial. p. 333. ISBN   9780060922719.
  13. 1 2 3 4 Gianfranco Bertone; Dan Hooper (24 May 2016). "A History of Dark Matter" (PDF). Fermilab. p. 61. Retrieved 28 April 2023.
  14. ↑ "Most of Our Universe is Missing". BBC Online . 10 February 2006. Archived from the original on 24 September 2022. Retrieved 29 April 2023.
  15. ↑ "Professor Frenk's cv". star-www.dur.ac.uk. Retrieved 20 November 2020.
  16. ↑ "Institute for Computational Cosmology". Durham University. Retrieved 20 November 2020.
  17. ↑ Waters, Richard (29 September 2020). "Durham Cosmologist recognised as being "of Nobel class" for work on evolution of the universe". Palatinate . Retrieved 24 April 2023.
  18. ↑ "Invisibility cloak and quantum physics tipped for Nobel Prize". France 24 . 5 October 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2023.
  19. ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021". Nobel Foundation. 5 October 2021. Archived from the original on 5 October 2021. Retrieved 6 October 2022.
  20. 1 2 Lock, Helen (30 November 2015). "The cosmologist who makes beautiful university buildings appear". The Guardian . Retrieved 24 April 2023.
  21. ↑ "Carlos Frenk". Royal Society . Retrieved 27 April 2023.
  22. ↑ "No. 61962". The London Gazette (Supplement). 17 June 2017. p. B8.
  23. ↑ "RAS Awards 2014". Astronomy & Geophysics. 55: 1.37 –1.38. February 2014. doi: 10.1093/astrogeo/atu040 .
  24. ↑ "The George Darwin Lectures" (PDF). Royal Astronomical Society. 2022. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  25. ↑ "Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize recipients". Institute of Physics . Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  26. ↑ "Born medal recipients". Institute of Physics. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  27. ↑ "2020 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize". Institute of Physics. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  28. ↑ "Prestigious Award for Galaxy Evolution Research". Durham University. 24 August 2021. Retrieved 21 March 2023.
  29. ↑ "Honorary Fellows" (PDF). Annual Report 2023. King's College, Cambridge: 10. 2023. Retrieved 15 May 2025.

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