Teaching and learning

Professor Davis is an award winning teacher who teaches 1st year physics and 3rd year astrophysics.

ARC Laureate Fellowship

Dark energy and dark matter are amongst the most profound puzzles facing fundamental physics. Prof. Davis’ Laureate Fellowship explores the dark side of the universe working with three new surveys. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) has discovered thousands of supernovae and measured positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will measure distances to tens of millions of galaxies. Taipan will measure velocities of about one million galaxies. The aim is to combine all this data together to make precise maps of dark matter, determine whether dark energy changes with time, measure the mass of the neutrino, and provide the anchor by which gravitational wave studies can measure the expansion rate of the universe.

Researcher biography

Professor Tamara Davis is an astrophysicist who studies the elusive “dark energy” that’s accelerating the universe. She’s measured time-dilation in distant supernovae, helped make one of the largest maps of the distribution of galaxies in the universe, and is now measuring how supermassive black holes have grown over the last 12 billion years. She did her PhD at the University of New South Wales on theoretical cosmology and black holes, then worked on supernova cosmology in two postdoctoral fellowships, the first at the Australian National University (collaborating with Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) and the second at the University of Copenhagen, before moving to Queensland to join the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey team working on mapping the galaxies in the universe. She led the Dark Theme within the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics, is helping manage the OzDES survey - working with the international Dark Energy Survey, and is now working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument project.

The Astronomical Society of Australia awarded her their Louise Webster Medal prize for the young researcher with the highest international impact in 2009, and she has since received the L’Oréal Women in Science Fellowship, the Australian Institute of Physics Women in Physics Lectureship, the Australian Academy of Science’s Nancy Millis Medal for outstanding female leadership in science, and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship.