Professor Tim de Zeeuw
Prof. Pieter Timotheus (Tim) de Zeeuw, Guest Lecturer at the Emilio Segre Distinguished Lectures in Physics Endowed by Raymond and Beverly Sackler for the academic year 2015/2016, is Professor of Theoretical Astronomy at Leiden University (The Netherlands) and Eso’s (European Southern Observatory) Director General.
Prof. de Zeeuw obtained his Ph.D. at Leiden University. Following that, he worked in the USA, first as a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and later as Senior Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Subsequently, he returned to the Netherlands to become a Professor of Theoretical Astronomy at Leiden University. A short time later, he became the founding director of NOVA, the Netherlandsˈ Research School for Astronomy, which coordinates the graduate education and astronomical research of five university astronomy institutes. A decade later, he became a member of the ESO’s Council and chaired the Council Scientific Strategy Working Group. In this capacity, he contributed to the development of ESO's strategic goals and organizational structure.
Prof. de Zeeuw holds Honorary degrees from the University of Padova, the University of Chicago and the Université Claude Bernard Lyon. He was also a Visiting Professor in Physics at the University of Oxford. He holds several esteemed awards, such as the RAS Group Award for the SAURON Team (2013), the Brouwer Award of the Dynamical Division at the American Astronomical Society (2009), and the French and Dutch governments Descartes-Huygens Prize (2001). He was a member of well-known organizations such as the Royal Astronomical Society (Honorary Fellow Associate), The Royal Holland Society of Sciences, the European Astronomical Society and more. He was formerly named one of the top 100 young scientists in the United States by Science Digest. He had an asteroid (10970, de Zeeuw) named after him by the International Astronomical Union.
Prof. de Zeeuw had edited 4 books, authored and Co-authored 200 refereed papers and has 215 conference contributions. His research concentrates on the formation, structure and dynamics of galaxies, including our own, the Milky Way. In Leiden, he led a group active in the construction of state-of-the-art dynamical models for galaxies, and their comparison to high-quality photometric and spectroscopic observations, with the aim of establishing the properties of dark matter halos around galaxies, probing the supermassive nuclear black holes, measuring the kinematics and dynamics of the different stellar populations, and ultimately understanding the process of galaxy formation.
