Invitation To PRIS 2021 Keynote Lecture| UNIVERSE | By Professor Neil Turok
You are cordially invited to join us online for the keynote lecture of the CAES Postgraduate Research and Innovation Symposium.
Title: Universe
Speaker: Professor Neil Turok
Neil Turok (PhD Imperial College London, 1983) was born to anti-apartheid activist parents who both later served as members of parliament in the New South Africa. Neil now holds the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He also holds the Niels Bohr Chair at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in
Canada where he is Director Emeritus. Previously, he was Professor of Physics at Princeton University and Chair of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Neil is a global leader in developing and testing theories of the universe. His team’s predictions for polarisation-temperature correlations in the cosmic background radiation (CBR) and for galaxy CBR correlations induced by dark energy were confirmed at high precision. He and his collaborators have recently developed a new, foundational approach to quantum path integrals, with wide applications ranging from particle physics and quantum technologies to cosmology and radio astronomy. He and his colleagues have proposed a new picture of the cosmos – the CPT-symmetric universe – which provides an economical, testable explanation for the cosmic dark matter and an explanation for the arrow of time. In 2016, he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the UK Institute of Physics and the John Torrence Tate Medal of the American Institute of Physics for International Leadership in Physics. Neil is the Founder and International Governing Board Chair of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), a network of centres of excellence for postgraduate maths and science training, research, and public outreach spanning the African continent. Since 2003, AIMS has graduated over 2 300 African students at Masters level, of whom over 600 have proceeded to PhDs, in many areas of science. In 2008, Neil won the TED prize for his work in fundamental cosmology and for his work founding AIMS. With colleagues at AIMS and at Edinburgh, he has pioneered a new approach to user-friendly, accurate and affordable testing for COVID-19 called hypercube pooling, which is now being implemented at scale. In 2019, Neil was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. He is the author of The Universe PRIS Within, a popular science bestseller, and co-author of Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang.