Pedro G. Ferreira

Last updated

Pedro Gil Ferreira
Born (1968-03-18) 18 March 1968 (age 56)
Lisbon, Portugal
NationalityBritish and Portuguese
CitizenshipBritish/Portuguese
Alma mater Technical University of Lisbon
Imperial College London
Known for Quintessence
Modified gravity
Scientific career
Fields Cosmology
Institutions University of Oxford
CERN
University of California Berkeley
Doctoral advisor Andreas Albrecht
Notable students Jo Dunkley [1]

Pedro Gil Ferreira (born 18 March 1968) is a Portuguese astrophysicist and author. [2] [3] As of 2016 he is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, [4] and a fellow of Wolfson College.

Contents

Education and early life

Ferreira was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and attended the Technical University of Lisbon, where he studied engineering from 1986–1991. While there, he taught himself general relativity. He studied for a PhD in theoretical physics at Imperial College London, supervised by Andy Albrecht.[ citation needed ][ when? ]

Research and career

He occupied postdoctoral positions at Berkeley and CERN, before returning to the UK to join the faculty in the astrophysics department at the University of Oxford as a research fellow and lecturer. [5] He became Professor of Astrophysics there in 2008. He has been director of the Programme on Computational Cosmology at the Oxford Martin School since 2010, and also runs an astrophysics 'artist in residency' programme. Ferreira regularly lectures at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and has frequently appeared on TV and radio as a science commentator.

Ferreira's main interests are in general relativity and theoretical cosmology. He has authored more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. [6] With Michael Joyce, in 1997 he was one of the first to propose quintessence scalar field models as a possible explanation of dark energy. Ferreira was also a member of the MAXIMA and BOOMERanG balloon-borne CMB experiments, which measured the acoustic peaks of the CMB. He is currently involved in several proposals to test general relativity using the Euclid spacecraft and Square Kilometre Array radio telescope.

Media

Ferreira is a regular contributor to the scientific press, including Nature , Science , and New Scientist , and has authored two popular science books on cosmology and the history of general relativity. One of them, The Perfect Theory, was shortlisted for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. He regularly appears on TV and radio to discuss astrophysics and cosmology news stories, and has contributed to several science and mathematics documentaries for the BBC, Discovery Channel, and others. In 2016 he serves on the editorial board of the Open Journal of Astrophysics. [7]

Books

TV and video

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">General relativity</span> Theory of gravitation as curved spacetime

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri</span> Bengali physicist (1923–2005)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the Big Bang theory</span> History of a cosmological theory

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jo Dunkley</span> British astrophysicist

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References

  1. Dunkley, Joanna (2005). Modern methods for cosmological parameter estimation : beyond the adiabatic paradigm. bodleian.ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC   500732473. EThOS   uk.bl.ethos.441310.
  2. Janna Levin (29 March 2016). Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. pp. 226–. ISBN   978-0-307-95820-4.
  3. Paul Halpern (10 August 2012). Edge of the Universe: A Voyage to the Cosmic Horizon and Beyond. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 57–. ISBN   978-1-118-23460-0.
  4. 1 2 "Watch this spacetime: gravitational wave discovery expected". The Guardian, Ian Sample, 9 February 2016
  5. Symmetry: Dimensions of Particle Physics. Fermi National Accelerator Lab. 2007. p. 92.
  6. Google Scholar report for Pedro Ferreira
  7. "Open journals that piggyback on arXiv gather momentum". Nature, Volume 530, Issue 7588, Toolbox Elizabeth Gibney, 04 January 2016
  8. Turney, Jon (19 April 2006). "Book Review: The State of the Universe by Pedro G. Ferreira" . The Independent . Archived from the original on 25 May 2022.
  9. Kean, Sam (7 February 2014). "Book Review: 'The Perfect Theory' by Pedro G. Ferreira". The Wall Street Journal .