ZOLTAN HAIMAN is a Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University. He received a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University in 1998, and a B.S. in Physics and Electrical Engineering from MIT. He had postdoctoral positions at Fermilab and at Princeton. His main research is on topics in theoretical astrophysics and cosmology, including the formation of the first stars and black holes, the subsequent growth of black holes, and determining the nature of dark energy and dark matter using large Astronomical surveys. He is a frequent user of NASA’s Pleiades and NSF’s XSEDE supercomputing facilities. His current research includes simulations of mergers between astrophysical black holes, and large-scale simulations of weak gravitational lensing, developing tools, including neural networks, to extract cosmological information from non-Gaussian features of the stochastic gravitational lensing signal.

Prof. Haiman is a recipient of NASA’s Hubble Fellowship, a Gyorgy Bekesy Fellowship from the Hungarian Ministry of Education, an NYAS Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists and a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. He was named in 2002 as one of the Brilliant 10 young scientists by Popular Science magazine. is currently serving on the Science and Technology Definition Team for NASA’s concept study for the X-ray satellite Lynx. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed publications, and has mentored 12 Astronomy and Physics PhD students.