Carlos Frenk

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Carlos Silvestre Frenk, CBE, FRS (born 27 October 1951) is a Mexican-British cosmologist. Since 2001 he has been the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University and led the Institute for Computational Cosmology from 2001 to 2020. He is known for work on how galaxies form, the nature of dark matter, and large computer simulations of the universe.

Early life and education
- Born in Mexico City. His father was a German-Jewish physician and his mother a Mexican pianist. His brother Julio Frenk is a physician and administrator.
- Studied engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) before switching to theoretical physics. He graduated in 1976 with the Gabino Barreda Medal.
- Moved to the University of Cambridge in 1976 on a British Council Fellowship, completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in 1977, and earned his PhD in 1981 under Bernard J. T. Jones, writing about globular clusters.

Career highlights
- Postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Marc Davis. In 1983, he helped show that neutrinos could not be the dark matter.
- Held positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Sussex.
- With Davis, White, and George Efstathiou, helped develop early cold dark matter (CDM) simulations; published the first large-scale CDM simulations in 1985.
- Joined Durham University in 1986 and became a professor in 1993. In 1994 he co-founded the Virgo Consortium for cosmological simulations.
- In 1996–1997, Frenk, White, and Julio Navarro described the Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW) profile, a widely used model for dark matter distribution in halos.

Later career and honors
- Became the first Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham and founding director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology, a role he held until 2020.
- Participated in the Virgo Consortium’s Millennium Run project and continues working on large-scale galaxy formation simulations.
- Married to Susan Frenk, a lecturer and college administrator; they have two sons.

Awards and recognitions
- Fellow of the Royal Society (2004) and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2017 for services to cosmology.
- Major awards include the Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal (2014), Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2006), the Daniel Chalonge Medal (2007), the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2011), the Max Born Prize (2017), the Dirac Medal and Prize (2020), and the Rumford Medal (2021).
- Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge (2023).
- Has appeared on TV and radio, including The Sky at Night and Desert Island Discs in 2018.