Joseph Silk is Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and emeritus researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique, CNRS and Sorbonne University, Paris.

He was Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to 2011, where he currently is a Senior Fellow at the Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.

He previously was Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he began his academic career (1970-1999).

He graduated from Cambridge University and obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1968.

Most of his scientific research s related to cosmology and particle astrophysics, and his specialties include the cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy formation and dark matter.

He is the author or coauthor of more than 800 papers in refereed journals, seven popular books, including The Big Bang (W. H. Freeman, 3rd ed, 2001) and Back to the Moon (Princeton University Press, 2025).

He has supervised more than 35 PhD or DPhil students, and more than 90 postdoctoral researchers.

Silk was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. He has received various awards including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Bakerian Lectureship of the Royal Society in 2008, the International Balzan Prize in 2011, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society in 2018, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology in 2019, and the Amaldi Award of the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation Physics in 2023.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Astronomical Society, and an honorary member of the French Physical Society. He currently has advisory as well as research activities, including studies of optical interferometry on the Moon as a member of a NAS review panel on Key Non-Polar Destinations Across the Moon to Address Decadal- level Science Objectives.