Dr Jo Dunkley

Personal web page: Dr Jo Dunkley

I am an RCUK Research Fellow in Astrophysics, and a Senior Research Fellow at Exeter College. I have been at Exeter since 2007.

Before moving to Oxford I was at Princeton as a post-doc, and before that I was at Oxford doing my DPhil in Astrophysics. I did my undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University.

My research is in cosmology, and I am particularly interested in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), relic light that provides us with a snapshot of the early Universe. I have been involved in determining properties of the Universe such as its expansion rate, its density, and how much dark matter and dark energy there appears to be. I have also used cosmological data to test inflationary models describing the rapid expansion of the Universe in the first fraction of a second. As part of my research, I am a member of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe science team, a NASA satellite located a million miles from Earth, and am also involved in a CMB experiment in Chile, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope.

We have already come a long way in formulating a model for the cosmos, but there are still important questions that I hope we will be able to answer in the coming years. These include: Is Inflation the correct description of the early Universe? What is the nature of dark energy? Is cold dark matter composed of particles, and if so what sort of particles are they?