Eiichiro Komatsu is a director at Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. He is also Honorary Professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Career and awards

Professor Komatsu obtained his PhD at Tohoku University. He served for a brief period as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University before joining as faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. He was director of the Texas Cosmology Center between 2009 and 2012. In 2012, he joined the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics as one of the directors.

Professor Komatsu received many prestigious awards. The list includes but is not limited to: the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2017); The Astronomical Society of Japan Chushiro Hayashi Prize (2014); The American Astronomical Society Lancelot M. Berkeley - New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy (2013) and the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2012). He was also a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015.

Research interests

Professor Komatsu’s primary interest is cosmology. He is perhaps best known for his contribution to the anisotropy measurement and data analyses of the cosmic microwave background with the WMAP satellite. He is the leading author of the WMAP cosmology papers since Year 5, each of which collected thousands of citations from broad communities in physics and astronomy. Besides, Prof. Komatsu has a very broad scope of research interests covering early universe cosmology including gravitational waves from inflation, large-scale structure, high-energy astrophysics, and particle dark matter searches, and has published lots of high impact papers.