Benjamin D Wandelt

Professor Benjamin Wandelt received his PhD in astrophysics from Imperial
College, London. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Theoretical
Astrophysics Center in Copenhagen from 1997 to 1999, and as a research
associate at the Department of Physics at Princeton University until 2001. He
joined the faculty of the Departments of Physics and Astronomy at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and received tenure in 2006.
In 2010 he was awarded the International Chair of Theoretical Cosmology at
Sorbonne University and the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris. Upon his arrival
in Paris he and his colleagues established the excellence laboratory Institut
Lagrange de Paris in cosmology, astro-particle, and theoretical physics; he was
named its director in 2014. Professor Wandelt has held long-term visiting
faculty positions at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics; Caltech;
Princeton University; the Institute for Advanced Studies; and NYU; and joined
the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York
City in 2018.

Professor Wandelt's research in theoretical, computational, and statistical
astrophysics connects fundamental physics and cosmology with astronomical data
ranging from stars to the largest scales accessible to observations. He has
won multiple awards in several countries such as the Xerox award, the Friedrich
Wilhelm Bessel prize, the Sofja Kovalevskaja award, and a senior French
Excellence Chair. He co-led the Primordial Non-Gaussianity analysis for ESA's
Planck mission and won multiple prizes as a Planck Scientist and core team
member, including the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology. He was elected Fellow of
the American Physical Society in 2015 and Fellow of the International
Association of Astrostatisticians in 2019. He is also the creator of
Cosmology@Home, a world-wide participatory computing platform with over 60,000
members.