Simon Lilly facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Simon Lilly
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Simon Lilly at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2014
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Simon John Lilly
January 1st, 1955 London, UK
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| Spouse(s) | Marcella Carollo |
| Awards | Herschel Medal (2017) |
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| Thesis | Evolution of radio galaxies (1983) |
| Doctoral advisor | Malcolm Longair |
Simon John Lilly is a well-known professor in the Department of Physics at ETH Zürich, a famous university in Switzerland. He is a FRS, which is a special honor for top scientists.
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Education and Early Research
Simon Lilly studied at the University of Cambridge and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences in 1980. He then went to the University of Edinburgh. There, he earned his PhD in 1983. His research focused on how radio galaxies change over time. His supervisor was Malcolm Longair.
Career and Discoveries
After getting his PhD, Professor Lilly worked at several important universities. He was a research fellow at Princeton University from 1984 to 1985. Then, he became a professor at the University of Hawaii and later at the University of Toronto. From 2000 to 2002, he was the Director General of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics.
In 2002, he became a professor at ETH Zurich. His wife, Marcella Carollo, also joined the university at the same time. Professor Lilly was even the head of the Department of Physics at ETH from 2015 to 2017.
Understanding Galaxies
Professor Lilly's main research is about galaxy formation and evolution. This means he studies how galaxies are born and how they change over billions of years.
He worked on a big project called zCOSMOS. This project helped scientists understand how galaxies develop in different parts of space. He also tries to find new ways to study the intergalactic medium. This is the gas that galaxies form from and exchange material with.
Awards and Special Honours
Professor Lilly has received many awards for his important work.
Fellow of the Royal Society
In 2014, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). This is a very high honor for scientists in the United Kingdom. The Royal Society noted that his early work helped measure the star formation history of the Universe for the first time. This means he showed when and how many stars were being made throughout cosmic time.
Herschel Medal
In 2017, he received the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society. This award recognized his work on the Canada-France Redshift Survey. This survey helped scientists measure how bright normal galaxies were over long periods of cosmic time. His work also inspired the first Hubble Deep Field, which took very deep pictures of the universe.
Highly Cited Researcher
Professor Lilly was also named a Highly Cited Researcher in 2017 and 2018. This means that many other scientists use and refer to his research in their own work.
