Andrew Pontzen is a professor of cosmology at University College London. He has written for New Scientist, BBC Sky at Night, and BBC Focus; lectured at the Royal Institution; and been featured as an expert on PBS's NOVA, the Discovery Channel's How the Universe Works, and other shows. Simulations are a major part of his research which spans cosmology, physics and computation. He lives in London.
Andrew Pontzen received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Cambridge.
His new book is The Universe in a Box: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos. In The Universe in a Box, cosmologist Andrew Pontzen explains how physicists model the universe's most exotic phenomena, from black holes and colliding galaxies to dark matter and quantum entanglement, enabling them to study the evolution of virtual worlds and to shed new light on our reality.
Andrew Pontzen (UCL) holds a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2013-2021) and an European Research Council Consolidator Grant (2019-2024). He received the Royal Astronomical Society Fowler Award (2016). Andrew is an expert on extracting physical insight from numerical simulations in cosmology, as well as comparing these simulations to observational constraints. His numerical codes have been cited in hundreds of publications across multiple fields of astronomy and cosmology.
