Daniel Baumann is first Stephen W Hawking Professor of Cosmology
Daniel Baumann has been appointed as the inaugural Stephen W Hawking Professor of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.
Professor Baumann will be the first person to hold the new Chair, which was established with the generous support of the Avery-Tsui Foundation. The Chair honours the unique legacy of Stephen Hawking, who was a member of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at Cambridge for 40 years.
“It's a tremendous honour for me to become the first Stephen Hawking Professor,” said Prof Baumann. “Stephen Hawking was an enormous figure in my field, so it is profoundly humbling to hold a Chair established in his name.”
Prof Baumann first became aware of Hawking’s work aged 14 when his father, a film director, gave him Hawking's popular science book A Brief History of Time. "I didn’t understand much of it, but I was fascinated by the deep questions about the Universe it describes, so I started studying physics."
His research focuses on two of the most fundamental questions one can ask about our Universe: how did it begin and where do planets, stars, and galaxies come from?
An invaluable source of information in this context is the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) — radiation left over from the hot Big Bang which telescopes can still detect even now. The CMB indicates that the structures we observe today grew from small fluctuations in the density of matter within the early Universe.
Statistical correlations between the fluctuations act as a "fossil record", holding clues as to what might have happened in the very first instants of the Universe's existence. Because the correlations span enormous distances – “larger than the distances you’d think signals could have travelled before the CMB was formed,” said Prof Baumann – they offer a surprising conclusion. "[They] tell us that the hot Big Bang was not the beginning of time," he said.
Before the hot Big Bang, so the correlations also suggest, the Universe underwent a period of exponential expansion, known as 'inflation'. During inflation physical conditions were so extreme, they are not readily described by conventional physics.
Prof Baumann has been instrumental in developing a new approach to understanding this dramatic period, which seeded the density fluctuations that eventually grew into the structures we observe today. Inspired by methods from particle physics and known as the ‘cosmological bootstrap’, the approach does not rely on individual models that make assumptions about what physics was like during inflation, but starts from some widely accepted, bedrock principles of physics. This new viewpoint has helped to drive a paradigm shift in the field and may eventually help us to fully understand the beginning of time and space.
“Daniel has made an extraordinary number of highly influential contributions to cosmology,” says Enrico Pajer, Professor of Theoretical Physics at DAMTP. “His work displays remarkable physical insight and an unusually refined sense for identifying deep and timely open problems. He combines originality, clarity, and breadth in a way that is truly rare.”
The cosmological bootstrap is just one of Prof Baumann’s many contributions, which have also included results on astrophysics, quantum field theory, and gravitational-wave physics.
Stephen Hawking's work pervades all of these topics. Apart from providing theoretical foundations for the idea that the Universe had a beginning, Hawking was also the first to dare to apply the physics of the very small, quantum physics, in a cosmological context.
This touches on the reason why cosmology is so appealing to Prof Baumann. "All the pillars of theoretical physics, known and unknown, combine when we think about the early Universe. It's an arena where the laws of Nature are stress-tested in the most extreme environment."
At DAMTP, Prof Baumann will be working at the intersection of various research groups and also play a leading role at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology. Beyond that he is planning to forge connections with the Institute of Astronomy as well as other leading research centres around the world, including the Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics at National Taiwan University, where he will continue to hold a joint appointment for some time.
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Words: Marianne Freiberger and Stephen Bevan
Image: Julian Baumann
Published: 18th June, 2026
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