Professor Tamara Davis
Personal page
Professor Tamara Davis's personal page
Teaching and learning
Professor Davis is an award winning teacher who teaches 1st year physics and 3rd year astrophysics.
ARC Laureate Fellowship
Dark energy and dark matter are amongst the most profound puzzles facing fundamental physics. Prof. Davis' Laureate Fellowship explores the dark side of the universe working with three new surveys. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) has discovered thousands of supernovae and measured positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will measure distances to tens of millions of galaxies. Taipan will measure velocities of about one million galaxies. The aim is to combine all this data together to make precise maps of dark matter, determine whether dark energy changes with time, measure the mass of the neutrino, and provide the anchor by which gravitational wave studies can measure the expansion rate of the universe.
See Laureate Fellowship website here
Researcher biography
Professor Tamara Davis is an astrophysicist who studies the elusive "dark energy" that's accelerating the universe. She completed her PhD in 2004 at the University of New South Wales on theoretical cosmology and black holes, then worked on supernova cosmology in two postdoctoral fellowships, the first at the Australian National University (collaborating with Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) and the second at the University of Copenhagen. In 2008 she moved to Queensland to join the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey team working on mapping the galaxies in the Universe. She led the Dark Theme within the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics, is now leading the OzDES survey -- working with the international Dark Energy Survey, and working with working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument project. As of 2024 she is Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery.
Her accolades include the Astronomical Society of Australia's Louise Webster Medal for early career research impact, the L'Oréal Women in Science Fellowship for Australia, the Australian Institute of Physics Women in Physics Lectureship, the Australian Academy of Science's Nancy Millis Medal for outstanding female leadership in science, an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship, the Astronomical Society of Australia's Ellery Lectureship, and a Member of the Order of Australia (AM).