The latest young cosmologist to officially ascend to the inner sanctum of the ivory tower is Ignacy Sawicki, who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis yesterday. (Some of us are less grudging with our congratulations than others.) I swooped into Chicago for the event, then swooped right back to LA last night, from which I will swoop over to Washington DC later today. Many miles were accumulated, but I had to be there for the defense, otherwise Wayne Hu totally would have claimed credit for being Iggy's advisor, just because they wrote more papers together. In just a few short years Iggy has written an impressive series of in-depth papers on the possibility of modifying general relativity to explain the acceleration of the universe.
Cosmological structure evolution and CMB anisotropies in DGP braneworlds, with S.M. Carroll, astro-ph/0510364.
Near-Horizon Solution for DGP Perturbations, with Y.-S. Song and W. Hu, astro-ph/0606285.
Large-Scale Tests of the DGP Model, with Y.-S. Song and W. Hu, astro-ph/0606286.
Modified-Source Gravity and Cosmological Structure Formation, with S.M. Carroll, A. Silvestri, and M. Trodden, astro-ph/0607458.
The Large Scale Structure of f(R) Gravity, with Y.-S. Song and W. Hu, astro-ph/0610532.
Stability of Cosmological Solution in f(R) Models of Gravity, with W. Hu, astro-ph/0702278.
Models of f(R) Cosmic Acceleration that Evade Solar-System Tests, with W. Hu, arXiv:0705.1158.
In the Fall he'll be taking his post-Einstein sensibilities to the socialist enclave in Greenwich Village, where such things are considered politically acceptable. Congratulations!
