Joe Silk

Who is Joe Silk?

Joseph Ivor Silk FRS was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011. He was educated at Tottenham County School and went on to study Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He gained his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard in 1968. Silk took up his first post at Berkeley in 1970, and the Chair in Astronomy in 1978. Following a career of nearly 30 years there, Silk returned to the UK in 1999 to take up the Savilian Chair. He is currently Professor of Physics at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and he joined Johns Hopkins University in 2010 as Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy.

He is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe. Silk has given more than two hundred invited conference lectures, primarily on galaxy formation and cosmology.