Professor
Vaida Endowed Chair
Office: 505 Physics Building
Phone: +1 (530) 7540552
Fax: +1 (530) 752-4717
Email: lknox@ucdavis.edu
Personal Professional Website:
http://www.lloydknox.com/
Research Interests:
Professor Lloyd Knox joined the faculty at UCD in 2001. His research activities are in the area of cosmology and include development of data analysis methods, analysis and interpretation of data, calculation of observable consequences of models, and motivation of future observations. There are over 100,000 citations to his more than 200 publications.
Professor Knox has motivated significant observational projects (including two satellites), brought to his field what are now standard data analysis tools, had the most precise determination of the age of the Universe, contributed to the establishment of the "Lambda CDM" cosmological paradigm, quantitatively predicted and then detected the clustering properties of the far-infrared background, and advised federal funding agencies how to support research in dark energy via his service on the Dark Energy Task Force.
In 2015 he and three of his graduate students were the first to detect the gravitational influence of the cosmic neutrino background on the temporal phase of acoustic oscillations in the primordial plasma (Follin et al. 2015, also described in Scientific American and by science journalist Ethan Siegel). In 2020, together with Marius Millea, he published an extensively read and cited guide to solving the Hubble tension, "The Hubble Hunter's Guide."
He is a member of the South Pole Telescope (SPT), South Pole Observatory, and CMB-S4 collaborations. His team at UC Davis led a recently-concluded (November 2024) analysis of the deepest high-resolution maps of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background ever made, maps made by SPT collaborators. The press release accompanying the public release of this analysis is available here.
Current research interests include the Hubble tension, the cosmological neutrino background, testing the Lambda CDM model, developing and testing alternative models, and searching for primordial gravitational waves. His work is currently supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science Theory program, the National Science Foundation, and a gift from Michael and Ester Vaida.
Research Areas
Career History
- Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1995
- Research Associate, Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, 1995
- Junior Research Associate, University of Toronto, 1995-1998
- Research Associate, University of Chicago, 1998-2000
- Assistant Professor, University of California Davis, 2000-2002
- Associate Professor, University of California Davis 2002-2006
- Professor, University of California Davis 2006-Present
Honors
- Fellow of the American Physical Society, 2012
- UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow, 2004-2009
- Edwin P. Hubble Scientist, 1998