Marc Davis (astronomer)

Davis was awarded an honorary PhD from the University of Chicago in 2008. He has also been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, and he has received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics from the American Institute of Physics and the American Astronomical Society, as well as the Gruber Prize in Cosmology in 2011, among numerous other prizes and awards.

While working on the DEEP survey, Davis suffered a stroke in June 2003; it has affected his right limbs although he continues to enjoy one of the main passions in his life, skiing.

Davis' work has been in physical cosmology and he has done a number of significant projects. While at Harvard, Davis led the CfA (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian) galaxy survey, the first redshift survey of galaxies, which motivated his interest in N-body simulations of the Universe. In the 1980s, Davis, now at Berkeley, was part of a collaboration—with George Efstathiou, Carlos Frenk, and Simon White—that established the validity of the "cold dark matter" theory for the formation of galaxies and other cosmic structures, now the accepted interpretation in cosmology. In a classic series of papers, that collaboration—often called DEFW by their peers—used computer code to simulate the growth of the universe and resolve disputes among theoretical models.

Marc Davis (born 1947) is an American Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Davis received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, his Ph.D from Princeton University in 1973 and has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences (1991) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992). Davis taught for a year at Princeton, 1973–74, then served on the Astronomy faculty at Harvard from 1975 to 1981. Since 1981 he has been on the faculty of the Department of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley.