Hiranya Peiris
Hiranya Peiris is the 1909 Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, the first woman to hold this prestigious chair in its 115-year history. She is a leading cosmologist known for her research into the origin and evolution of the universe, especially through the study of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Born in Sri Lanka in 1974, Peiris moved to the United Kingdom and studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, graduating from New Hall (now Murray Edwards College) in 1998. She completed her Ph.D. in Astrophysics at Princeton University in 2003 under David Spergel, focusing on data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a major project that provided strong evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation. After postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago, Peiris returned to the U.K., holding academic positions at Cambridge and later at University College London, where she directed the Cosmoparticle Initiative.
Peiris’s work has earned her many honors, including the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2012) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2018).
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