TALK TOPIC: Understanding the expansion of the Universe

Richard Battye is orginally from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. He studied Mathematics at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge obtaining 1st class honours in 1991 and a certificate of advanced study (Part III Maths) in 1992. He started his reseach career under the supervision of Paul Shellard in the Relativity Group (led by Stephen Hawking) in DAMTP and was awarded a PhD in 1995 for his thesis on “String radiation, interactions and cosmological constraints”. He was elected a research Fellow of Trinity in 1995 and was awarded a PPARC postdoctoral fellowship. As a postdoc he spent 2 years at Imperial College in the University of London as a member of the theoretical physics group and 4 years back in DAMTP.

In 1999 he was awarded a PPARC advanced research fellowship. In September 2001 he moved to the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester as a lecturer. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005, Reader in 2008 and Professor of Cosmology in 2012. He is now the Associate Director for Science and the Head of Cosmology research group in the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and is an associate member of the theoretical particle physics group. He works on cosmology and its links with fundamental physics and astrophysics.