Simon Lilly

Simon Lilly is a Professor in the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, leading a research group established in 2002 as part of the university's astrophysics expansion. His internationally diverse team (9 members from 8 nationalities) conducts observational, computational, and theoretical research while contributing to advanced instrumentation development for ground-based and space telescopes. He actively teaches across all levels of the Physics curriculum.

His research centers on cosmic galaxy evolution, with landmark contributions including the Canada-France Redshift Survey (1992-1996) that revealed a tenfold decrease in universal star formation over 10 billion years, and the zCOSMOS project mapping 30,000 galaxies via 600 VLT hours to analyze environments from group scales to the cosmic web. Current work probes the intergalactic medium through metal absorption lines and MUSE spectrograph observations, alongside investigations of high-redshift magnetic fields via Faraday Rotation.

Professor Lilly's exceptional impact is recognized by:

• 2017 Herschel Medal for outstanding observational astrophysics (Royal Astronomical Society)
• 2017 Highly Cited Researcher status (top 1% globally, Clarivate Analytics)
• 2017 Carl Sagan Memorial Award for James Webb Space Telescope leadership
• Election as Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS, 2014)

He mentors award-winning students including Yingjie Peng (2016 MERAC Prize winner) and Julien Carron (2014 Schläfli Prize recipient), with research sustained through major projects like zCOSMOS. His group identifies fundamental galaxy population simplicities to uncover dominant physical processes shaping cosmic structure.

Based in ETH Zurich's Physics Department, his team integrates observational data analysis, large-scale simulations, and theoretical work to address why the universe appears 'running out of steam' in star formation—a question driving modern astrophysics since his seminal 1990s discoveries.