Jo Dunkley, a professor of physics and astrophysical sciences at Princeton University in New Jersey, will receive a 2020 New Horizons in Physics Prize. The New Horizons Prize is worth $100,000. It is awarded for achievements in physics and math. It is part of a family of awards from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. Professor Dunkley will be honored this year at a Breakthrough Prize ceremony on Sunday, November 3, at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
Professor Dunkley studies the origins and evolution of the universe. She shares the prize with Samaya Nissanke of the University of Amsterdam and Kendrick Smith of the Perimeter Institute and a former Princeton postdoctoral fellow, for their “development of novel techniques to extract fundamental physics from astronomical data.”
Before coming to Princeton in the fall of 2016, Professor Dunkley was a professor of astrophysics at Exeter College of the University of Oxford in England. Dunkley is the author of Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide (Harvard University Press, 2019).
Professor Dunkley earned a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. She conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton University during the 2006-07 academic year.