Professor Hiranya V Peiris

Hiranya holds the Professorship of Astrophysics (1909) at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge.

Hiranya conducts interdisciplinary research based on extracting fundamental physics from cosmological data. She has led analyses of cosmological survey data from multiple major international facilities, as well as making major contributions to theoretical cosmology and statistical astronomy. 

After obtaining her undergraduate degree at Cambridge in 1998, where she was a member of New Hall, Hiranya completed her PhD at Princeton (2003). She was a Hubble Fellow at Chicago before returning to Cambridge as a Science and Technology Facilities Council Halliday Fellow. She was then appointed to a lectureship (2009) and Professorship (2015) at UCL. She was Director of the Oskar Klein Centre in Stockholm (2016-2022) and Director of the UCL Cosmoparticle Initiative (2016-2023).

Her work has been recognised by awards such as the IOP Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize (2018), the Max Born Prize of the German Physical Society and the IOP (2021), and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2021). Her contributions to survey cosmology have been recognised through a share of the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2012) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2018), both awarded to the WMAP Science Team. She was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2022.