Alumnus Professor George Efstathiou has been awarded the Shaw Prize for Astronomy 2025

The prize, worth US $1.2 million, was awarded for "their pioneering research in cosmology, in particular for their studies of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Their predictions have been verified by an armada of ground-, balloon- and space-based instruments, leading to precise determinations of the age, geometry, and mass-energy content of the universe.”

Honorary Doctor of Science

George, Emeritus Professor at Cambridge, was a PhD student at Durham's Physics Department from 1976 to 1979. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Durham University in January 2025.

The Shaw Prize also recognises other contributions to cosmology. Efstathiou has been one of the leaders in the study of the clustering and evolution of galaxies as revealed by ever larger and deeper galaxy surveys, was an early advocate for a universe whose mass-energy was dominated by dark energy, and with his collaborators developed N-body simulations as a powerful tool for studying large-scale structure in the universe. He also played a leading role in the analysis of data from the Planck spacecraft. More generally, their research touches on almost every aspect of modern cosmology and has made fundamental contributions to the establishment of the standard cosmological model.

Professor Carlos Frenk from Durham’s Department of Physics and Institute for Computational Cosmology said:

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