Having held several competitive postdoctoral fellowships, in 2007 Peiris returned to the University of Cambridge as an STFC Advanced Fellow and was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge in 2008. In 2009, Peiris won a Leverhulme Trust award for cosmology and secured a faculty position at University College London. She is currently Professor of Astrophysics at UCL and also the Director of the for Cosmoparticle Physics in Stockholm. In 2012, the WMAP team won the Gruber Cosmology Prize for their "exquisite measurements of anisotropies in the relic radiation from the Big Bang---the Cosmic Microwave Background". WMAP's results on cosmic inflation, which Peiris contributed to, were described by Stephen Hawking as "the most exciting development in physics during his career". She was skeptical about the 2014 announcement of the discovery of primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background: "If they announce gravitational waves on Monday then I will need a great deal of convincing. But if they do have a robust detection... Jesus wow! I'll be taking next week off." Mike Hockney used this quote to illustrate that even top scientists need convincing because scientific discoveries are always just interpretations of results. Her skepticism proved well-founded: on January 30, 2015, a joint analysis of BICEP2 and Planck data was published and the European Space Agency announced that the signal can be entirely attributed to dust in the Milky Way, though gravitational waves have since been detected by different experiments. In 2016, Peiris was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society and Vice President of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2018, Peiris was awarded the Hoyle Medal and Prize of the UK Institute of Physics for “her leading contributions to understanding the origin and evolution of cosmic structure." In 2020 Peiris was awarded the Göran Gustafsson Prize in physics by the Göran Gustafsson Foundation and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences "for her innovative research on the dynamics of the early universe, which links cosmological observations to basic physics”. She was also elected as a member of STFC Council, the senior strategic advisory body of the research council that funds particle physics and astronomy in the United Kingdom.
Public engagement
Alongside academic talks, Peiris gives public lectures about cosmology. She has written articles and given interviews for both radio and print media. She has appeared on podcasts, television programs and the national news. In 2013 she gave a talk at TEDxCERN, "Multiplying Dimensions." That year she was selected as one of Astronomy's top ten rising stars by Astronomy Magazine. In 2014, the pseudonymously-written Ephraim Hardcastle diary column in the Daily Mail claimed that Peiris had been selected to discuss results from the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 experiment on BBC Newsnight because of her gender and ethnicity. These comments were condemned by mainstream media, the Royal Astronomical Society and Peiris' employer, University College London, and the Daily Mail and its column backed down within days. Peiris offered a rebuttal, "Groundbreaking science is blind to prejudice" in Times Higher Education. In 2017, Peiris collaborated with artist Penelope Rose Cowley to create artwork entitled "Cosmoparticle".
Awards
2020 - Göran Gustafsson Prize in Physics, Göran Gustafsson Foundation and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2018 - Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize, Institute of Physics 2018 - Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 2014 - Buchalter Cosmology Prize 2012 - Gruber Prize for Cosmology, Gruber Foundation 2012 - Fowler Prize, Royal Astronomical Society 2009 - Philip Leverhulme Prize, Leverhulme Trust 2007 - Halliday Prize, STFC 2007 - Kavli Frontiers Fellow, National Academy of Sciences
One of a team awarded the 2018 Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics
Peiris was a member of the 27-person team awarded the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The US$3 million award was given for the detailed maps of the early universe generated from WMAP. WMAP is a NASA explorer mission that was launched in 2001, which has transformed modern cosmology.
