Meet Trinity’s 2022 Sloan Fellow

Dan Scolnic has a modest goal: understanding the fundamental nature of the Universe. His ambition was recognized this year with a Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Scolnic, assistant professor of Physics and Trinity’s first Packard Fellow, is a cosmologist. His research seeks to determine the rate at which our Universe is expanding by comparing what we know about the Universe’s compact infancy to the size it has reached now, at the proud age of around 13.5 billion years (a number itself intricately related to Scolnic’s research).

Cosmologists have a standard model they can use to predict properties of the Universe today, but recent data indicates that these predictions are off the mark: the Universe is expanding faster than it should be.