Notable awards Royal Society | Name Simon Lilly | |
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Institutions ETH ZurichHerzberg Institute of AstrophysicsUniversity of TorontoUniversity of HawaiiPrinceton University Known for Redshift surveysCosmic Evolution Survey Institution ETH Zurich, Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, University of Toronto, University of Hawaii, Princeton University | ||
Academic advisors Malcolm Longair | ||
Simon J. Lilly FRS is a Professor at in the Department of Physics at ETH Zürich.
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Education
Lilly was educated at the University of Cambridge where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences (Physics and Theoretical Physics) in 1980. He went on to study at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a PhD in 1983 for research on the evolution of radio galaxies supervised by Malcolm Longair.
Career
Following his PhD, Lilly was a SERC/NATO postdoctoral research Fellow at Princeton University from 1984 to 1985. He was appointed Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at the University of Hawaii from 1985 to 1990, then Full Professor at the University of Toronto from 1990 to 2000. He served as Director General of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics from 2000 to 2002 before being appointed Professor at ETH Zurich in 2002. He was Head of the Department of Physics at ETH (2015-2017).
Research
Professor Lilly's research mostly focusses on galaxy formation and evolution.
Awards and honours
Simon Lilly was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His nomination reads: Simon Lilly is an outstanding observational astronomer who has led many important studies of how normal galaxies evolved over the past 10 billion years. His early work provided the first convincing measurement of the star formation history of the Universe. This landmark result was influential in providing support for theoretically motivated models of galaxy assembly. He has also pioneered ambitious surveys coupling Hubble Space Telescope imaging with ground-based spectroscopy. By connecting data from various epochs, his imaginative work has provided valuable new insights into how the various galaxy populations change with cosmic time.
Simon Lilly was awarded the 2017 Herschel Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society. His citation reads: Professor Simon J. Lilly was the driving force behind the now famous `Canada-France Redshift Survey', which in 1995-1996 provided the first measurement of the luminosity density of normal galaxies over cosmological timescales. The incontrovertible evidence he found for rapid evolution in the rate of star formation during the last two-thirds of the age of the Universe motivated the follow-up census at higher redshifts with the first Hubble Deep Field. These two data sets became known as the Lilly-Madau diagram, encapsulating the progress of star formation in the Universe over 90% of its history. This characterisation of galaxy evolution has been enormously influential and continues to be a rich vein of extragalactic research to the present day. Professor Lilly is an imaginative and accomplished observer and is one of Europe's most influential extragalactic astronomers.