User:Pnrj/August Evrard

August Evrard is a theoretical astrophysicist, computational cosmologist, and former administrator at the University of Michigan. The Hubble Volume Project he led with the Virgo Consortium broke the world record for largest cosmological simulation, and a paper he co-authored on the Millennium Simulation was cited over 1,000 times. In all he has been cited over 10,000 times. His work has been instrumental in developing the Lambda-CDM model, the standard model of cosmology.,

Early Career

Evrard earned his BA in physics in 1981 from the University of Pennsylvania and then his PhD in physics from SUNY Stony Brook in 1986. His PhD dissertation was on dark matter and the clustering dynamics of galaxies. In summer of 1986, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton; then from 1986 to 1988 he was a NATO Fellow and SERC Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. From 1988 to 1990, he was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley.

University of Michigan

In 1990, Evrard became an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, and then an associate professor in 1996. During that time he also worked as a visiting researcher at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, at Durham University, and at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He became a full professor at Michigan in 2001. From 2008 to 2010 he served as Associate Budget Director at the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, then from 2010 to 2012 he served as Associate Chair of the Undergraduate Program at the University of Michigan Physics Department.

Current Research

Evrard's current work focuses upon computer modeling of large-scale cosmological structures, such as galactic clusters. He develops simulations of gigaparsec regions of space, following their evolution over billions of years of time. These complex simulations require high-performance supercomputers, and have been run in data centers in several countries, including COSMA at Durham University. In his work as both professor and administrator, Evrard has advocated many new innovations in physics education, including Open.Michigan and Coursera; materials he developed have been used across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. He teaches an honors course on computational science, what he calls the "fourth paradigm" of science. Evrard and Andrey Kravtsov of the University of Chicago co-direct the simulation working group for the Dark Energy Survey Evrard also collaborates with Timothy A. McKay on galaxy cluster projects based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Dark Energy Survey.