Benjamin D. Wandelt is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the departments of Physics and Astronomy and Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Johns Hopkins University. His research and teaching span cosmology, theoretical and computational physics, astronomy, artificial intelligence, statistics, and scientific computing.
Wandelt’s work in theoretical, computational, and statistical astrophysics bridges fundamental physics and cosmology with astronomical data, from stellar scales to the largest observable structures in the universe. He is particularly known for developing advanced statistical and computational methods to extract physical insight from complex, data-rich observations.
Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Wandelt held early-career research fellowships at the Theoretical Astrophysics Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and in the Department of Physics at Princeton University. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2001 as an assistant professor in Physics and Astronomy, receiving tenure in 2006. In 2010, he was awarded the International Chair of Theoretical Cosmology at Sorbonne University and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, where he later became founding co-director—and subsequently director—of the Institut Lagrange de Paris, a center focused on cosmology, astroparticle physics, and theoretical physics.
Wandelt has held long-term visiting faculty appointments at institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Caltech, Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and New York University. In 2017, he joined the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City.
His contributions have been widely recognized internationally. Wandelt co-led the Primordial Non-Gaussianity analysis for ESA’s Planck mission and was a core member of the Planck science team, receiving multiple honors including the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology. His awards include the Xerox Award, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize, the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, and a Senior Excellence Chair from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015 and Fellow of the International Association of Astrostatisticians in 2019.
Wandelt is also the creator of Cosmology@Home, a global participatory computing platform that engages more than 60,000 members worldwide in cosmological research.