20 Facts About Amanda Weltman

Amanda Weltman was born on 1979 and is a South African theoretical physicist.

Amanda Weltman is best known for co-authoring a series of papers proposing "chameleon gravity" to explain the existence of dark energy.

Amanda Weltman is currently a professor and South African Research Chair at the University of Cape Town.

Amanda Weltman was first drawn to physics while she was an undergraduate student at the University of Cape Town.

Amanda Weltman did post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge as part of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology run by physicist Stephen Hawking.

Amanda Weltman is currently director of the High Energy Physics, Cosmology and Astrophysics Theory group which she founded in 2018.

Amanda Weltman spent her childhood in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Amanda Weltman lives with her husband Jeff Murugan, who is a string theorist at the same university.

Amanda Weltman met him in 1997, and has three children with him.

Amanda Weltman has stated that she was glad to be brought up in a family without gender stereotypes, and that barriers that female scientists faced were particularly harmful when they occurred in the form of stereotypes that children were exposed to.

Amanda Weltman became known when she co-authored a 2004 paper titled "Chameleon Cosmology" with Justin Khoury, which proposed a theory to explain dark energy.

Amanda Weltman was a 24-year-old graduate student at Columbia University at the time.

Khoury and Amanda Weltman proposed the existence of a new force that drove this expansion, which changed depending on the environment it was in.

In 2007 Amanda Weltman joined an experimental team at Fermilab on the GammeV experiment which has been designed to search for axion like particles.

In recent years Amanda Weltman has made substantial contributions to astrophysics, in particular to the field of Fast Radio Bursts, mysterious millisecond-long bursts of radio waves that originate from distant galaxies.

Amanda Weltman is playing a leading role in the Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment currently under construction in South Africa.

Amanda Weltman has written a number of articles for the public, for Nature News and Reviews and has given interviews on a range of topics related to science, cosmology and astrophysics for assorted print media.

Amanda Weltman has served the science community, especially in South Africa, through leadership roles on national boards and academies.

Amanda Weltman has served on the Steering Board for the National Institute of Theoretical Physics of South Africa since 2015, and currently serves on the steering board for the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences.

Amanda Weltman has served on the Steering Board for the East African Institute for Fundamental Research in Rwanda since 2018.