Rate My Professor Andrew Pontzen

Professor Andrew Pontzen is a Professor of Cosmology in the Department of Physics at Durham University, where he serves as Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, followed by junior research fellowships at Cambridge and the University of Oxford. He then held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at University College London, where he also co-directed the Cosmoparticle Initiative. Pontzen's research focuses on cosmology, particularly the interplay between the visible universe of stars and galaxies and the underlying dark matter and dark energy. He develops genetically modified simulations to link cosmic histories with observable galaxy traits through the GM Galaxies programme, explores quantum simulators for processes like vacuum decay in the QSimFP project, and interprets data from cosmological surveys including the cosmic microwave background and Lyman-alpha forest. He is the primary author and maintainer of pynbody and tangos, analysis tools for simulation outputs acknowledged in nearly 300 publications across astrophysics, particle physics, and cosmology.

Pontzen has received prizes from the Royal Astronomical Society for his contributions and was appointed to the Science and Technology Facilities Council in 2025. His influential publications include 'How supernova feedback turns dark matter cusps into cores' (2012, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society), 'Ripples in the baryon to dark matter ratio in ΛCDM: implications for galaxy formation' (2026, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society), and 'The emergence of globular clusters and globular-cluster-like dwarfs' (2025, Nature). He authored the popular science book 'The Universe in a Box' (2023, Jonathan Cape), explaining universe modeling from quantum scales to cosmic structures. An award-winning communicator, Pontzen has presented at the Royal Institution, contributed to BBC Radio, New Scientist, and TED-Ed, and serves on the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee. He currently supervises PhD students such as Joaquin Sureda and Owen Jessop.