Asantha Cooray

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Asantha R. Cooray is a professor and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine, and a research member at the California Institute of Technology. He works in space science, cosmology, and astrophysics, studying the early universe, the first stars, and galaxies. He participates in space-based and NASA sounding rocket experiments and is part of the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory–SPIRE team, as well as NASA missions planned for this decade, including the Inflation Probe. He has helped develop the halo model for how galaxies cluster in the large-scale structure and has created methods to measure dark energy and dark matter. He also serves as a science editor for the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP).

Education and career highlights:
- Education: He studied at Royal College in Colombo, Sri Lanka, then earned a B.S. in Physics, Mathematics, and Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, and an M.S. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT; an M.S. and Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 2001) under Wayne Hu.
- Postdoctoral and early career: Sherman Fairchild Senior Research Fellow in theoretical astrophysics at Caltech (2001–2005).
- Awards: NSF CAREER Award (2007); NASA Group Achievement Awards (2012 and 2014).