Debora Šijački is Šijača computational cosmologist whose research involves computational methods for simulating the formation and development of the structures in the universe including galaxies, galaxy clusters, and dark matter, including collaborations in the Illustris project. Originally from Serbia, she was educated in Italy and Germany, and works in the UK as a professor at the University of Cambridge and deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology.

Education and career

Šijački is originally from Belgrade, the daughter of Serbian physicist , and grew up in Dorćol, a neighborhood of Belgrade. She was an undergraduate at the University of Padua in Italy, and completed a Ph.D. through Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany in 2007 for research performed at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. Her dissertation, Non Gravitational Heating Mechanisms in Galaxy Clusters, was jointly supervised by and Simon White.

Debora Šijački

She came to the University of Cambridge in 2007–2010, as a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Astronomy. After continued postdoctoral research from 2010 to 2012 in the US at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, she returned to the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy in 2013 as a university lecturer. She became Reader in Astrophysics and Cosmology in 2016, and Professor of Astrophysics and Cosmology in 2021.

Debora Šijački

Recognition

Šijački received the Otto Hahn Medal for her doctoral research. She was the 2019 recipient of the Ada Lovelace Award for High Performance Computing of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), recognizing her "numerous high-impact results in astrophysics based on numerical simulations on state-of-the-art supercomputers".

Debora Šijački

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Cosmologists Astrophysicists Women astrophysicists Computational physicists Scientists from Belgrade Serbian women scientists University of Padua alumni Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni Professors of Astrophysics (Cambridge)