Hiranya Peiris

Hiranya Vajramani Peiris is a British astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, University College London, and Stockholm University, best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation. She was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their "detailed maps of the early universe." Education and early life Peiris was born in Sri Lanka. She completed the Natural Sciences Tripos at University of Cambridge in 1998, as an undergraduate student of New Hall, Cambridge. She earned a PhD at Princeton University from the department of astrophysical Sciences with advisor David Spergel, where she first worked on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Career and research After her PhD, she went on to work at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago as a Hubble fellow. Having held several competitive postdoctoral fellowships, in 2007 Peiris returned to the University of Cambridge as an Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) advanced fellow and was awarded a junior research fellowship at King's College, Cambridge in 2008. In 2009, Peiris won a Leverhulme Trust award for cosmology and secured a faculty position at University College London. She is currently Professor of Astrophysics (1909) at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, and also the Director of the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics in Stockholm. She was previously Professor of Astrophysics at UCL