Mathew Madhavacheril: New Horizons Breakthrough Prize

Mathew Madhavacheril, an assistant professor of physics & astronomy within the School of Arts & Sciences, is amongst a small cohort receiving the New Horizons in Physics Prize, an early-career laureate funded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. The recognition, one of many highest in science, is available in honor of his work round advances in cosmic microwave background (CMB) and supernovae cosmology, and features a $100,000 prize.

Awarded yearly, the New Horizons prize acknowledges distinctive achievements from junior researchers in physics. Dr. Madhavacheril’s work seeks to grasp how the universe started, in addition to its evolution over billions of years. His analysis, which has obtained important funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), probes questions across the nature of darkish matter and darkish power, mysterious forces that respectively make up the majority of the universe and appear to contribute to its enlargement. As a part of that work, Dr. Madhavacheril, who’s a part of Penn’s Center for Particle Cosmology, was concerned with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) venture primarily based in northern Chile, which centered on learning CMB, leftover radiation from when the universe was in its earliest levels. He now works with the NSF-funded Simons Observatory, a brand new telescope venture in the identical space co-directed by Mark Devlin, the Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. 

“This is a tremendous honor and a testament to the extraordinary work Mathew has produced so early in his career,” mentioned Marisa Kozlowski, affiliate dean for the pure sciences and the Ponzy Lu Endowed Professor of Chemistry. “We look forward to seeing where his cutting-edge interdisciplinary program takes him in the years ahead.”

The New Horizons prize has gone to CMB researchers earlier than—together with a few of Dr. Madhavacheril’s mentors—underscoring the worth that the topic holds for the broader area of physics. Dr. Madhavacheril is receiving the prize alongside 5 different researchers: Dillon Brout of Boston University; J. Colin Hill of Columbia University; Maria Vincenzi of the University of Oxford; Daniel Scolnic of Duke University; and W. L. Kimmy Wu of Caltech. 

“Everything I have done has been collaborative,” Dr. Madhavacheril mentioned. “My work would not have been possible without the talented graduate students and postdocs I have been so lucky to work with, the builders who create incredible instruments like ACT, and my mentors, who inspired me and taught me how to solve problems.”

Dr. Madhavacheril and his colleagues obtained the New Horizons award on April 18 as a part of a stay occasion in Los Angeles. The broader Breakthrough Prizes are yearly awarded within the classes of Life Sciences, Mathematics, and Fundamental Physics.