The University of Cape Town invites you to an inaugural lecture by Professor Amanda Weltman.

Professor Amanda Weltman from the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics will present her inaugural lecture titled “From the Laboratory to the Sky: New Windows on the Universe”.

Date: Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Time: 17:00 SAST
Venue: M304, Mathematics Building, Upper Campus

Come and join Professor Amanda Weltman on a journey through the cosmos as she takes you on an expedition from the tiniest vibrating strings to the great expanse of the Universe at large, exploring how to build theories and test them in varied environments and at all scales.

You will get a crash course on our current understanding of the large-scale picture of the Universe and everything in it, while exposing the ever-greater crises facing Cosmology today and learn about chameleon gravity, a novel theory of gravity Prof Weltman developed as a PhD student, and the many efforts in the intervening years to discover its effects in the laboratory and through astrophysical observations.

Professor Weltman will conclude this journey of discovery with the groundbreaking potential of using the radio sky as our laboratory for fundamental physics discovery.

About the speaker

Professor Amanda Weltman is a theoretical physicist in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics specializing in connections between theoretical cosmology, astrophysics, and fundamental physics. She is renowned for proposing and developing chameleon gravity, an innovative theory of gravity that makes novel predictions and explains dark energy consistent with all observations.

Prof Weltman received her PhD from Columbia University in 2007, on Cosmological Moduli Dynamics under Prof Brian Greene. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology led by Prof Stephen Hawking and took up a position of Lecturer at the University of Cape Town in 2007.

Her research has earned significant recognition, amassing over 10 000 citations and resulting in numerous accolades, including the Meiring Naude Medal from the RSSA and the Silver Jubilee medal from the SAIP. She held the South African Research Chair in Physical Cosmology since 2016, and currently serves as the head of the High Energy Physics, Cosmology & Astrophysics Theory Group, which she established in 2019. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2020.