Professor Dan Hooper

Dan Hooper is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center. A leading researcher in the fields of particle cosmology and high-energy astrophysics, he lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of At the Edge of Time, Dark Cosmos, and Nature’s Blueprint, and cohosts the popular science podcast, Why This Universe? His latest book, The Attack of the Science Populists, will come out in 2027.

Azadeh Fattahi

Azadeh Fattahi is an associate professor of Physics and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow at Stockholm University. She obtained her PhD in 2017, before joining Durham University, UK as a postdoctoral fellow (2017-2020) and later on a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and faculty member (2021-2025). Her research focuses on galaxy formation and the nature of dark matter, with an emphasis on dwarf galaxies, the Milky Way, and the nearby Universe, where the most detailed observations are available. Her research group develops and uses state-of-the-art, high-resolution cosmological simulations to explore the connection between galaxy formation and the underlying physics of dark matter.

Dr Simona Vegetti

Simona Vegetti is a Lise Meitner Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA). She obtained her degree from the University of Turin in 2005 and her PhD from the University of Groningen in 2010. During her doctoral research at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, she developed a Bayesian gravitational lens–modelling technique for detecting dark matter substructures, now known as gravitational imaging. From 2010 to 2012, she was a Pappalardo Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she reported the first gravitational imaging detection of a very low-mass dark matter halo at high redshift. She joined MPA in 2013 as a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently became a Max Planck Research Group Leader, a position she held until 2020. At MPA, she consolidated her research programme on dark matter while broadening her interests to include galaxy evolution and cosmic magnetism. In 2018, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant. She is a founding member of the SHARP collaboration and a member of the Euclid Strong Lensing Working Group.

Professor Celine Boehm

Professor Celine Boehm is an Astroparticle physicist who worked in the UK (Oxford, Durham), France (CNRS), Switzerland (CERN), Canada (Perimeter institute) and Australia (USYD).She is known for her work across Cosmology/Particle Physics/AstroparticlePhysics.Professor Boehmhas been the lead of the space mission consortium ESA/Theia (leading more than 200 researchers in the collaboration) and was also the Head of School of Physics at the University of Sydney. Her work on dark matter has motivated a plethora ofnew experiments e.g. NA64, SENSEI, DAMIC, FASER,and new searches such as XENON1T,BELLE, DAPHNE, KLOE, etc.Professor Boehmwas the first to quantify the impact of dark matter interactions with the Standard Model particles on the CMB and large-scale-structure formation and also, with her collaborators, the first to perform N-body simulations of these scenariosto determine the number and properties of satellite companions of the milky Way. She further contributed to the first predictions of the CMB spectrum for the first relativistic extension of MOND (the so-called TeVeS theory). Her research topics are currently much broader and range from digital health to new technologies.