Carlos Frenk

Carlos Silvestre Frenk CBE FRS
Frenk in 2012
Born	(1951-10-27) 27 October 1951
Citizenship	British, German and Mexican
Alma mater	University of Mexico (BSc) University of Cambridge (PhD)
Known for	Navarro–Frenk–White profile
Spouse	Dr Susan Frenk
Children	2
Scientific career
Fields	Astrophysics
Institutions	Durham University University of Sussex University of California, Santa Barbara University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	Globular clusters in the galaxy and in the Large Magellanic Cloud (1981)
Doctoral advisor	Bernard J. T. Jones
Doctoral students	Ben Moore Gillian Wilson
Website	https://astro.dur.ac.uk/~csf/homepage/index.html

Carlos Silvestre Frenk CBE FRS (born 27 October 1951) is a Mexican-British cosmologist. Frenk graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Cambridge, spending his early research career in the United States, before settling permanently in the United Kingdom. He joined Durham University in 1986 and has served as the Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University Department of Physics since 2001.

Frenk is most notable for his work on galaxy formation, including his use of complex computer simulations to test theories on the origins and evolution of the universe. Alongside Marc Davis, George Efstathiou, and Simon White, he published a series of papers that established the validity of the cold dark matter hypothesis. He has written over 500 scientific articles and co-authored 5 of the 100 most cited papers ever published within his field. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004 and has received numerous awards.

Early life and education

Carlos Frenk was born in Mexico City, Mexico, and is the eldest of six children. His younger brother, Julio Frenk, is a public health expert and former Mexican Secretary of Health. His father, a German-Jewish physician, emigrated from Germany at the age of seven to escape antisemitic persecution before World War II, while his mother was a Mexican–Spanish pianist. As a youth, Frenk showed some basketball talent and played semi-professionally. His other passion was mathematics.

Frenk initially studied engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before switching to theoretical physics, earning his undergraduate degree in 1976. He graduated with the highest marks in his year and was awarded the Gabino Barreda Medal. While visiting Italy, he attended a guest lecture by Martin Rees, then a professor at the University of Cambridge. Encouraged by Rees, Frenk decided to apply to Cambridge rather than pursue his original plan to study at Caltech.

That year he secured a British Council Fellowship and enrolled at the University of Cambridge to read Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, which he completed in 1977. He remained at Cambridge for doctoral studies under the supervision of Bernard J. T. Jones. His doctoral research explored the properties of the Milky Way. The idea of dark matter was still "extremely speculative" at this point, but Frenk concluded that the galaxy was surrounded by "embedded" dark matter. He was awarded his PhD in astronomy in 1981.

At Cambridge, Frenk decided to shift his research focus to cosmology because he felt there was still plenty of "exciting problems" within this field left to be solved; he thought particle physics was "moving rather slowly" and, despite help from professors, could not identify a suitable fundamental physics project for doctoral research that engaged his interest. He met future collaborator Simon White for the first time at Cambridge. White, already a post-doc, acted as what Frenk later called his "unofficial supervisor".

Career and research

Early career, 1981–1986

Following Cambridge, Frenk worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California. He arrived at Berkeley in 1981, having been invited by Marc Davis, an astronomer who had recently left Harvard. At Berkeley, Davis needed Frenk, with his background in theoretical physics, to assist in interpreting his research — which was based on a survey of approximately 2,200 galaxies conducted during his time at Harvard. Meanwhile, White had also moved to Berkeley. This allowed Davis, Frenk, and White to collaborate on research into the early state of the universe through the use of computer modelling.

As consensus grew during the late 1970s for the existence of dark matter, the neutrino was identified as a natural candidate. Davis, Frenk, and White concluded in a 1983 paper that dark matter could not be made of neutrinos; they argued that, even if neutrinos had the required mass, they would move too quickly to be able to 'clump together' and form galaxies.

Frenk left Berkeley for nearby Santa Barbara in 1983. He was officially attached to the University of Sussex from 1984 to 1985. During this two-year period, he frequently divided his time between Britain and America, having established a system of 'transatlantic commuting' by working alternately three months in Santa Barbara and three at the University of Sussex.

Gang of Four

Computational astronomy was still an emerging discipline, and the trio of Davis, Frenk, and White knew they required extra support to produce more advanced computer code. George Efstathiou, a recent PhD from Durham University, was recruited to help them. With the addition of Efstathiou, the group worked on a series of papers; they focused on the supersymmetric theory that dark matter particles were "cold".

In 1985, Frenk and his collaborators published an influential paper in The Astrophysical Journal that revealed the first simulations of cold dark matter. Despite the limited computing power available to them, their research had produced results — and Davis, Efstathiou, Frenk, and White were nicknamed the 'Gang of Four' for the attention their arguments attracted. Their combined efforts confirmed the validity of the "cold dark matter theory" for the formation of galaxies and other cosmic structures. This model later became the prevailing interpretation in cosmology.

Move to Durham, 1986–2001

In 1986, Frenk was appointed Lecturer at Durham University, having been recruited by Richard Ellis. He later described finding the physics department in Durham to be "tiny" upon his arrival, with "no theory" and astronomy "non-existent". With Ellis' support he worked on strengthening the profile of the department in astronomical research, but struggled to access the computing power demanded by his computational approach. After unsuccessful attempts to borrow computers from commercial laboratories, he finally secured a model from the MicroVAX series at a cost of £40,000. Frenk was promoted to Reader in 1991 and then made full Professor in 1993. During this period of his career he turned down job offers from both the United States and Mexico, including one position that would have more than doubled his salary.

While their papers were impactful, Frenk and White's theories did not represent the scientific consensus at this time. Throughout the 80s and 90s, they faced significant critique by proponents of other dark matter theories. The most prominent alternative theory was Modified Newtonian dynamics, proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1981. However, in 1993 evidence from the Cosmic Background Explorer offered further support for Frenk and White.

Research efforts at Durham were boosted by the 1994 announcement of the High Performance Computing Initiative, which promised more resources from the government in future. By now, White was based at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and he and Frenk joined their institutions with other computational astronomers to form the Virgo Consortium. This gave Frenk and his team access to the supercomputing centre of the Max Planck Society in Garching, regarded as among the best facilities in the world.

Navarro-Frenk-White profile

Main article: Navarro-Frenk-White profile

By the mid-1990s, the cold dark matter model had become widely accepted, and predictions of cosmological simulations shifted from the distribution of cold dark matter halos to the shapes of those halos.

In 1996 and 1997, Frenk, White, and lead author Julio Navarro of the University of Arizona, published results based on their analysis of halos from cold dark matter simulations. This collaboration produced the Navarro-Frenk-White profile, a model profile for dark matter halos. The model describes the spatial mass distribution of dark matter within a halo. It remains a widely used standard in the study of dark matter and galaxy formation.

• 
  Comparison of NFW and Einasto profile
• 
  Julio Navarro

2001–present

The Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics

Following an endowment from Computacenter founder Peter Ogden in 2001, Frenk was named the inaugural Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics at Durham University. He became the Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) upon its establishment in 2001, and held this post until 2020, at which point he was succeeded by Durham colleague Shaun Cole.

In 2005, as a member of the Virgo Consortium, Frenk was part of a team that produced the Millennium Run. At the time, this was the largest and most realistic cosmological N-body simulation ever, and took 28 days to run. In a later interview, Frenk summarised his cosmological simulation work as "cosmic cookery" because it depended on selecting just the right "ingredients", putting it into a computer, and letting it "cook". He remarked that he and his colleagues at the ICC had "filing cabinets" full of failed universes.

By 2008, Frenk was one of the top 10 most cited astronomers in the world. In 2020, he was named a Clarivate Citation Laureate for his highly-cited research, which was judged to be of "Nobel Class". Along with Julio Navarro and Simon White, he was named a potential winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, though victory at a later date was considered more likely. In 2021, the trio of Frenk, Navarro and White was again named as a strong contender for that year's Nobel.

Personal life

Frenk is married to Dr. Susan Frenk, a lecturer in Spanish and Latin American literature and current Principal of St Aidan's College. They have two sons.

Frenk has an interest in architecture, which was inspired by his experience studying at the main campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a UNESCO World Heritage site. He was unimpressed with the state of academic buildings when he first moved to Britain, describing them as "dark, claustrophobic and in a state of disrepair" and has taken an active role in the design process of new buildings at Durham University.

Fellowships, awards and distinctions

Frenk was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2004. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to cosmology and the public dissemination of basic science.

He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2014.

Other awards include the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2006), the Daniel Chalonge Medal of the Paris Observatory (2007), the George Darwin Lectureship (2010), the Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (2010), the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2011), the Max Born Prize of the German Physical Society (2017), the Dirac Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (2020), and the Rumford Medal (2021).

In 2023, he was made an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, his postgraduate alma mater.

Media appearances

Frenk made his television debut in 1986 on an episode of the Australian series Beyond 2000. He has made numerous appearances since then, and by his own estimation, has taken part in 32 television programmes for the BBC, including The Sky at Night. He has also appeared on BBC Radio on multiple occasions and was interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs, first broadcast in 2018.

Sources

•  This article incorporates text available under the CC BY 4.0 license.

External links

• Media related to Carlos Frenk at Wikimedia Commons