Honorary Fellow Carlos Frenk awarded a Knighthood in King's Birthday Honours
We're delighted to congratulate Professor Sir Carlos Frenk (KC 1977), a world-leading cosmologist at Durham University, on receiving the honour of Knight Bachelor in the King's Birthday Honours.
Carlos Frenk was a graduate student at King's in the late 1970s while studying for a PhD at the University's Institute of Astronomy. He is a world-renowned cosmologist, whose contributions to the technique of cosmological supercomputer simulations were pivotal to the development of the Cold Dark Matter theory of the formation of cosmic structure. Carlos Frenk has pioneered in using computer simulations to study the formation of structure in the Universe. Together with Marc Davis, Simon White and King's Fellow George Efstathiou, he co-authored an influential set of papers on the 1980s which established the currently accepted paradigm of a Universe is dominated by dark matter.
Carlos has been Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics and the University of Durham since 2001. He co-created the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics at Durham and was the founding Director of the Centre’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, with a particular focus on hydrodynamical simulations designed to explain the formation of galaxies. The Ogden Centre is one of the prime institutions in the world for research into the evolution of our Universe and the nature of elementary particles. Navarro, Frenk and White are coauthors of one of the most highly cited papers in Physics (10,061 citations) describing the structure of dark matter halos.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004 and has been awarded numerous prizes including the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2011, shared with Davis, Efstathiou and White), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2014) and the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society (2021). In addition to his research, Carlos is passionate about outreach and explaining the latest discoveries about our Universe to a wide audience. He initiated a programme of public outreach at Durham, including a yearly summer camp focused on STEM teaching for Ukrainian children who have lost at least one of their parents in the war.
"My career as an astrophysicist began at King's (cosmology did not exist then as a separate discipline)," Frenk noted. "In my 4 years there, and at the Institute of Astronomy, I learned astrophysics, of course, but I learned much more than that: the importance of intellectual courage, the challenge of pursuing oneʼs own ideas, the primacy of debate and criticism, and the value of collaboration."
My years in King's shaped the rest of my life - I met my wife, Susan, who has been my greatest inspiration and support, in the Late Night Bar, and I made friends for life. I am very proud of being an Honorary Fellow of this wonderful institution.
Professor Sir Carlos Frenk