Thouless Lecture showcases excellence in the Natural Sciences

Back to all news

Posted:

07 Mar 2025

Trinity Hall’s newly launched Thouless Natural Sciences Lecture series, established in honour of alumnus and Nobel prize-winner Professor David Thouless (1952), celebrates science at Trinity Hall.

The inaugural lecture delivered yesterday (6 March) by Honorary Fellow, alumna and renowned astrophysicist Professor Jo Dunkley discussed our quest to understand the history of the universe from the Big Bang to today, by studying distant light coming from the earliest moments in time.

Professor Dunkley discussed how using telescopes high in the Chilean desert tuned to measure millimetre-wavelength light can help answer questions about how fast space is growing, how space started to grow, and how much of the cosmos is made of invisible dark matter. By surveying half the sky every couple of days, Professor Dunkley and her research team hope to see new types of astronomical events in distant parts of the universe.

We were delighted to welcome Professor Thouless’s wife Margaret and daughter Helen to College, who sat in the audience with students, academics and staff from Trinity Hall and across the University.

The Thouless Natural Sciences Lecture is open to all and will be delivered every other year, next occurring in 2027.

The lecture also marks the beginning of the 2025 Trinity Hall Spotlights series, which this year focusses on ‘space’. It aims to bring insights into the latest research into cosmology and physics which is helping us understand more about what lies beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Through different academic perspectives, lectures and discussions, we aim to encourage excitement, awe, and greater understanding of these areas of knowledge, fascinating for their own sake and for how they help us reflect on our own place in the universe.

Beth Sufian and alumnus James Passamano (1998) kindly provided a gift to set up the Thouless Natural Sciences Lecture series.

About Professor Jo Dunkley

Jo Dunkley is the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. She read Natural Sciences at Trinity Hall from 1997 to 2001, and is an Honorary Fellow of the College. Her research is in cosmology, studying the origins and evolution of the Universe. She plays leading roles in the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and Simons Observatory projects. She has been awarded the Maxwell Medal, the Rosalind Franklin award and the New Horizons prize for her work on the cosmic microwave background, and she shared the Breakthrough Prize with the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) team. Dunkley’s book for the general public, Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide, was published in 2019, and she speaks regularly to public audiences. In 2019 she received an OBE for services to science, and in 2024 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

About Professor David Thouless

David Thouless was a Trinity Hall alumnus (1952) and Nobel Prize winner. He was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the College in 2014. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016 “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”. In May 2024 his family donated his medal and diploma to the College. Central topics of his work included the theory of topological phase transitions, the theory of randomness and disorder in magnetic and metallic systems, and the definition of topological order in terms of topological invariants.