Professor Sir Roger Penrose gives second Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture

His lecture, entitled 'Deep Questions of cosmology: did something happen before the Big Bang?', will be held at 3:00pm in Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge.

Andrew Chamblin, (1969-2006), pictured, was a graduate of Rice University who moved to the UK as a graduate student. He spent a year at Christ Church, Oxford, and then moved to St John's College, Cambridge to take a PhD in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics under the joint supervision of Professors Gary Gibbons and Stephen Hawking.

Andrew’s interests evolved from twistors and classical relativity to quantum gravity and the newly emerging synthesis of super-string theory and supergravity, now known as M-theory, to which, over the next few years, he made a number of striking contributions using to the full his powerful geometric intuition and deep understanding of general relativity.

Andrew subsequently became Draper Research Fellow at Pembroke College and then held post-doctoral appointments at University of California at Santa-Barbara, MIT, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Queen Mary College, London, before taking up an academic post at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

After his death, Andrew's family, friends and colleagues across the world have generously donated to a Fund in his memory. The Fund provides for an annual Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture at the University of Cambridge on a subject relevant to Andrew's life and work. The first Lecture was given in 2007 by Professor Stephen Hawking.

Professor Sir Roger Penrose, is well-known for his distinguished work in mathematics and theoretical physics -- he is the inventor of twistor theory and the discovery of Penrose tilings -- and for his writing on the connection between fundamental physics and human consciousness.