Ian Robert Smail is a British astrophysicist. He is an emeritus Professor of Physics at the Durham University Department of Physics, based in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, itself part of the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics. [1] Since 2015, he has been ranked as one of the most highly-cited researchers in Space Sciences. [1]
Smail attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge on a Hooper Scholarship, where he completed the Natural Sciences tripos, graduating with an M.A. in Physics and Theoretical Physics in 1989. [2] He carried out his doctoral studies in Astronomy (1989–1993) at Durham University ( University College ), for a thesis entitled Gravitational Lensing by Rich Clusters, supervised by Richard Ellis CBE FRS. [2]
From 1993 to 1995 Smail was a NATO Advanced Research Fellow in the Physics, Maths and Astronomy Division at Caltech, and subsequently a Carnegie Fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science. [2] He returned to Durham in 1996 to become a PPARC Advanced Research Fellow (1996–1998) and then from 1998 a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Physics. He was made a Professor in 2004. [2]
In 2001 Smail, alongside fellow Durham researcher Ben Moore, was one of the first recipients of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in the Astronomy and Astrophysics category. [3] He received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2013. [4] In 2025 he was awarded the Herschel Medal [5] of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is a learned society and charity that encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science. Its headquarters are in Burlington House, on Piccadilly in London. The society has over 4,000 members, known as fellows, most of whom are professional researchers or postgraduate students. Around a quarter of Fellows live outside the UK.
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010. He has received various physics awards including the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2024 for fundamental contributions to high-energy astrophysics, galaxies and structure formation, and cosmology.
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.
Richard Salisbury Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at the University College London. He previously served as the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was awarded the 2011 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 2022 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and in 2023 the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
Robert Charles Kennicutt, Jr. FRS is an American astronomer. He is currently a professor at Texas A&M University. He is a former Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge. He was formerly Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal (1999–2006) and became a co-editor of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics as of 2021. His research interests include the structure and evolution of galaxies and star formation in galaxies.
Eric Ronald Priest is Emeritus Professor at St Andrews University, where he previously held the Gregory Chair of Mathematics and a Bishop Wardlaw Professorship.
Dame Carole Jordan,, is a British physicist, astrophysicist, astronomer and academic. Currently, she is Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. From 1994 to 1996, she was President of the Royal Astronomical Society; she was the first woman to hold this appointment. She won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2005; she was only the third female recipient following Caroline Herschel in 1828 and Vera Rubin in 1996. She was head of the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford from 2003 to 2004 and 2005 to 2008, and was one of the first female professors in Astronomy in Britain. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2006 for services to physics and astronomy.
Carlos Silvestre Frenk is a Mexican-British cosmologist. Frenk graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Cambridge and spent his early research career in the United States, before settling permanently in the United Kingdom. He joined the Durham University Department of Physics in 1986 and since 2001 has served as the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University.
Richard Massey is a physicist currently working as Royal Society Research Fellow in the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University. Previously he was a senior research fellow in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology and STFC Advanced Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh. Massey graduated in Maths and Physics from the University of Durham in 2000 and was a member of Castle. He completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge in 2003, with a thesis entitled Weighing the Universe with weak gravitational lensing.
Reinhard Genzel is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. In a 2021 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Genzel recalls his journey as a physicist; the influence of his father, Ludwig Genzel; his experiences working with Charles H. Townes; and more.
The Department of Physics at Durham University in Durham, England, is a physics and astronomy department involved in both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and scientific research.
George Petros Efstathiou is a British astrophysicist who is Professor of Astrophysics (1909) at the University of Cambridge and was the first director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge from 2008 to 2016. He was previously Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford.
Sir Martin Hairer is an Austrian-British mathematician working in the field of stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He is Professor of Mathematics at EPFL and at Imperial College London. He previously held appointments at the University of Warwick and the Courant Institute of New York University. In 2014 he was awarded the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours a mathematician can achieve. In 2020 he won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
Steven Andrew Balbus is an American-born astrophysicist who is the Savilian Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at New College, Oxford. In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize for Astronomy with John F. Hawley.
André da Silva Graça Arroja Neves is a Portuguese mathematician and a professor at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2016. In 2012, jointly with Fernando Codá Marques, he solved the Willmore conjecture.
James Scott Dunlop is a Scottish astronomer and academic. He is Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at the Institute for Astronomy, an institute within the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.
Sheila Rowan is a Scottish physicist and academic, who is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and director of its Institute for Gravitational Research since 2009. She is known for her work in advancing the detection of gravitational waves. In 2016, Rowan was appointed the (part-time) Chief Scientific Advisor to the Scottish Government.
Hiranya Vajramani Peiris is a British astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, where she holds the Professorship of Astrophysics (1909). She is best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation, and interdisciplinary links between cosmology and high-energy physics. She was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their "detailed maps of the early universe".
Joanna Dunkley is a British astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at Princeton University. She works on the origin of the Universe and the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, the Simons Observatory and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
Rebecca Smethurst, also known as Dr. Becky, is a British astrophysicist, author, and YouTuber who is a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She was the recipient of the 2020 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship, awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as the 2020 Mary Somerville Medal and Prize, awarded by the Institute of Physics. In 2022, she won the Royal Astronomical Society's Winton Award "for research by a post-doctoral fellow in Astronomy whose career has shown the most promising development".