Congratulations to Vikram!

Another young scientist joins the ranks of credentialed scholars. Congratulations to Vikram Duvvuri, who just defended his Ph.D. thesis on ``Modified Gravity as an Alternative to Dark Energy''! This was not an easy one, through no fault of Vikram's -- a certain member of his thesis defense committee got stuck on the East Coast, and had to phone in, after numerous delays. But Vikram kept his cool throughout all of the tense drama, and made it through the defense itself unscathed. The thesis was based on two papers on which I was a collaborator: Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due to New Gravitational Physics? with Mark Trodden and Michael Turner, and The Cosmology of Generalized Modified Gravity Models with the same authors plus Antonio De Felice and Damien Easson. The idea is to explain the observed acceleration of the universe by modifying gravity rather than introducing dark energy. That is to say, ...