2010 Medal Winners | francais

The 2010 CAP Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics

is awarded to

J. Richard Bond

"I consider this Achievement Award as CAP's recognition of the large impact our Canada-wide efforts in unveiling cosmic mysteries has had on the physics world, as well as for my work. And the timing is perfect as we celebrate 25 years of the enabling partnership of our Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research." winner citation

The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) is pleased to announce that the 2010 CAP Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics is awarded to J. Richard Bond, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, in recognition of for his broad and fundamental contributions to cosmology and astrophysics, and his leadership which has contributed greatly to Canada's well-recognized efforts in these areas. He has developed the study of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background into a powerful tool for the understanding of the structure and history of our universe. announcement

J. Richard Bond, University Professor in the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Cosmology & Gravity Program and a Gruber Laureate, is one of the most eminent cosmologists in the world. He has helped usher the field through three decades of what has been described as its "golden age." He is known for solving outstanding and important problems through detailed and thorough calculations and comparisons with observation. He has made seminal contributions to the study of the origin and evolution of large-scale structure in the universe, including the critical role that different types of dark matter could have played, whether cold, warm or hot (neutrino) relics of the first few moments of the Big Bang, black hole remnants or Jupiter-mass stars. He led the development of the theory of random fields as a tool for the study of structure formation in the Universe. He is best known for throwing open the window on the universe’s origins by listening in on the universe's earliest “baby cries” – contained in cosmic background radiation, the oldest light energy that any telescope can detect, the photon afterglow of the Big Bang. He has developed the theory and observation of its fluctuations into a tool of exceptional power to determine with high precision fundamental parameters characterizing the material content and structural properties of our Universe. Through his leadership and mentoring of a host of postdoctoral fellows, he has propelled Canada into a cosmological powerhouse. nominator citation

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