Richard Massey (born 14 October 1977) is a physicist currently working as Royal Society Research Fellow in the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University. [1] Previously he was a senior research fellow in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology [2] and STFC Advanced Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh. [3] Massey graduated in Maths and Physics from the University of Durham in 2000 and was a member of Castle. [4] He completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge ( Clare College) in 2003, with a thesis entitled Weighing the Universe with weak gravitational lensing. [5]
Massey is most well known for his studies of dark matter, including the first 3D map of its large-scale distribution [6] [7] and its behaviour during collisions. [8] [9] He was awarded the 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Astronomy and Astrophysics. He has featured in several TV documentaries, including BBC's Horizon documentary "How Big is the Universe?" in 2013 [10] and online. [11] [12]