Roy Maartens

Biography

Roy Maartens is a cosmologist. His research focuses on answering fundamental questions about the universe, including: The ‘dark energy’ problem – why is the universe expanding faster and faster? The smoothness problem – is the universe smooth on very large scales and how can we test this? The Einstein problem – when does the Newtonian approximation break down in cosmology and how can we detect this? He obtained his BSc and Honours degrees in physics and applied maths from the University of Cape Town and then won a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University. He was awarded a PhD in cosmology by UCT, under the supervision of George Ellis. From 1983 to 1994 he was a lecturer and then senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. Between 1994 and 2010, he was at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. In the period 2002-2010, he was the founding Director of the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation at Portsmouth, which grew to become one of the top cosmology groups in the UK. He was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the UK’s Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council during 2002-2005, and later served on the UK Particle Astrophysics Advisory Board. He currently holds the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Research Chair in Astronomy & Astrophysics at UWC. Roy has co-authored the book Relativistic Cosmology (Cambridge, 2012) with George Ellis and Malcolm MacCallum. He has published more than 150 articles in international refereed journals. Since 2003, he has been a member of the Editorial Board of General Relativity & Gravitation, and was an editor for the influential Special Issue of GRG on Dark Energy. From 2012, he and Abhay Ashtekar are the GRG editors-in-chief. He has been invited to numerous international conferences as a plenary speaker, and has supervised over 20 postdoctoral and 15 doctoral researchers.

Research Interest

Atronomy & Astrophysics