Catherine Heymans


Catherine Heymans is a British astrophysicist and Professor at the University of Edinburgh based at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.

Education

Heymans received a first class Master of Physics degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2000. In 2003 she received her Doctor of Philosophy from University of Oxford for research supervised by and on gravitational lensing.

Career and research

She won a series of prestigious fellowships at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Institut d'astrophysique de Paris and University of Edinburgh. In 2009 she was awarded a starting grant from the European Research Council and subsequently appointed a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
Heymans is best known for her work on using the technique of cosmic weak gravitational lensing to learn more about the Universe. She led the Shear Testing Programme STEP1 competition and co-leads the lensing collaboration of the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey: CFHTLenS.
Heymans is one of the leaders of the European Southern Observatory project Kilo-Degree Survey.
In 2018, she was presented with the "Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award", which is worth €1.5 million and financed by funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The award is presented jointly by the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award will be used to establish the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing at the
Ruhr University Bochum.
Heymans teaches on the Massive open online course at Coursera on AstroTech: The Science and Technology behind Astronomical Discovery. Her research has been funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Awards and honours

Heymans was awarded the George Darwin Lectureship by the Royal Astronomical Society in 2017. In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.