Göttingen University Celebrates Recipient of the Humboldt Research Award

The physicist Professor Martin Schmaltz from Boston University in the USA has received a Humboldt Research Award, which is worth 60,000 euros, from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Schmaltz has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Göttingen, since August 2023, where he has worked primarily with Professor Laura Covi and her research group “High Energy Physics and Cosmology”. His research focuses on the interface between cosmology and particle physics and the question of how dark matter and dark radiation can be unified and modelled theoretically, and what predictions for cosmological measurements follow from such models.

“This collaboration brings perfectly matched complementary expertise in cosmology and theoretical particle physics to our institute. We look forward to it opening open up new directions in research,” says Covi. Schmaltz has been teaching theoretical particle physics at Boston University since 2001. He studied physics at the Universities of Göttingen and California where he also received his PhD in 1995. From 1995 to 2000, he worked as a postdoc at Boston University and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and from 2000 at the Fermi National Laboratory. In 2002, the US Department of Energy honoured him with the Outstanding Junior Investigator Award, and in the same year he was appointed an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow.

On Monday 11 December 2023, Schmaltz will talk at the Faculty of Physics on the subject: “The trouble with Hubble – new physics from the cosmological expansion rate?” It will begin at 16:30 in Lecture Hall 1 of the Faculty of Physics, Friedrich Hund Platz 1 is aimed at researchers and all interested are warmly invited to attend.