The Royal Astronomical Society is delighted to hear that 2022 Gold Medal winner Professor George Efstathiou has jointly received the 2025 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.
Professor Efstathiou, of the University of Cambridge, was recognised alongside Professor John Richard Bond, of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics.
The pair were honoured for their "pioneering research in cosmology, in particular for their studies of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background".
"Their predictions have been verified by an armada of ground-, balloon- and space-based instruments, leading to precise determinations of the age, geometry, and mass-energy content of the universe," the citation added.
Professors Efstathiou and Bond share the $1.2million (£890,000) prize money equally.
The annual award is given by the Shaw Prize Foundation, which was founded in 2002 by Hong Kong-based filmmaker, television executive and philanthropist Sir Run Run Shaw, who died aged 106 in 2014. It will be presented at a ceremony in Hong Kong on 21 October.
There are also Shaw Prizes for life science and medicine and mathematical sciences.
In 2022, Professor Efstathiou received the RAS Gold Medal in Astronomy. In the award citation, he was described as being "amongst the most distinguished cosmologists of his generation".
He studied physics at Oxford before completing a PhD in astronomy at Durham University in 1979.
Professor Efstathiou, who is a Fellow of the RAS, has contributed to studies of large-scale structure in the universe, galaxy formation, dark energy and the cosmic microwave background radiation.
He was also involved in the European Space Agency's 'time machine' mission, the Planck Satellite, which looked back to the dawn of time close to the Big Bang and ran from 2009 to 2013.