Prof. Will Percival is jointly appointed at the Perimeter Institute and at the University of Waterloo, where he holds the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Distinguished Research Chair in Astrophysics, and is the Director of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics. Will is a cosmologist working primarily on galaxy surveys, using the positions of galaxies to measure the cosmological expansion rate and growth of cosmological structure. He currently holds senior scientific management positions within the Euclid satellite experiment and has served in a number of management positions for other surveys, including the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS). Over the next decade, the resulting galaxy surveys will transform our knowledge of dark energy, the physical mechanism accelerating the present-day cosmological expansion rate. Among his many honours, he received the 2008 Fowler Prize of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Distinguished Scientist fellowship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2016. He has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential scientists, appearing on the Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics list of “Highly Cited Researchers” multiple times. In the photo below he can be seen in July 2023, waiting for the launch of Euclid (on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the background).

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