10 Facts About Joseph Silk

Joseph Ivor Silk was born on 3 December 1942 and is a British-American astrophysicist.

Joseph Silk was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011.

Joseph Silk is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Joseph Silk was awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe.

Joseph Silk was educated at Tottenham County School and went on to study Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, followed by a diploma in astrophysics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Roger Jennison.

Joseph Silk obtained his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard in 1968, under the direction of David Layzer.

Joseph Silk took up his first post at Berkeley in 1970, and the Chair in Astronomy in 1978.

Joseph Silk is currently Professor of Physics at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, and was Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College from 2015 to 2019.

Joseph Silk has over 900 publications, nearly 200 as first author, of which 3 have been cited over 1000 times, over 50 have been published in Nature and 12 in Science.

In 2011, Joseph Silk delivered a talk, "The Creation of the Universe," at the first Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands.