Navin Sivanandam

 I was born and grew up in England, where I also did my undergraduate degree, at Cambridge. After 22 years of English weather, I had had enough and I relocated to California, for my PhD. This was at Stanford, where my supervisor was Renata Kallosh and my research was mostly on string cosmology. After Stanford I went on to do a postdoc at The University of Texas at Austin where I focussed on inflationary cosmology. And now I’m here at AIMS, ready to continue on in my next postdoc .

What inspired you to study science?

I think I’ve wanted to be a scientist ever since I realised that becoming a superhero wasn’t a realistic proposition. And after a little contemplation (I was only 11 at the time) it occurred to me that maybe I could fake convincing super powers with enough scientific knowledge…

Do you have a role model in science?

Steven Weinberg. Possibly the most exciting voicemail I ever received was Professor Weinberg offering me a postdoc at UT.

A quote that inspires you?

“Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.”

Lillian Hellman – The Little Foxes

Research interests

• Theoretical cosmology
• Inflation
• The anthropic principle, the multiverse and the fundamental limits of cosmology

A list of all Navin’s papers can be found here.

 

Favourite reference papers:

The most thumbed books on my desk are Weinberg’s “Cosmology” and Carroll’s “Spacetime and Geometry”. As for resources, Mathematica is never far from my fingertips when exploring the mathematics of the universe.