Hiranya Peiris is Professor of Astrophysics at University College London (UCL) and Director of the UCL Cosmoparticle Initiative. She is also currently serving as Director of the Oskar Klein Centre, Stockholm.
After obtaining her undergraduate degree at Cambridge, Professor Peiris completed her PhD at Princeton. She was a Hubble Fellow at Chicago before returning to Cambridge as a Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Halliday Fellow. She was then appointed to a lectureship (2009) and Professorship (2015) at UCL.
Professor Peiris conducts interdisciplinary research based on extracting fundamental physics from cosmological data. She has led analyses of cosmological survey data from multiple major international facilities, as well as making major contributions to theoretical cosmology and statistical astronomy. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2016); her work has been recognised by awards such as the IOP Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize (2018) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2009), as well as shares in the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2012) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2018). She served as a Vice-President of the Royal Astronomical Society (2016-2018).
Last updated: 31 March 2022