Fay Dowker

Fay Dowker
Born
Helen Fay Dowker

(1965-09-09) 9 September 1965 (age 59)
Manchester, England
EducationUniversity of Cambridge (BA; PhD 1990)[3]
AwardsTyson Medal (1987)
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
Causal sets[1]
Institutions
ThesisSpace-time wormholes (1990)
Doctoral advisorStephen Hawking[2]
Websiteimperial.ac.uk/people/f.dowker

Helen Fay Dowker (/ˈdaʊkər/; born 9 September 1965) is a British physicist who is a current professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London.[4][5][6][7][8]

Education

Dowker attended Manchester High School for Girls.[9] As a student, she was interested in wormholes and quantum cosmology. Having studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, Dowker was awarded the Tyson Medal in 1987 and completed her Doctor of Philosophy for research on spacetime wormholes supervised by Stephen Hawking[2][3] in 1990.[3][10]

Career and research

Dowker completed postdoctoral research at Fermilab, at the University of California, Santa Barbara and also the California Institute of Technology.[11][12]

Until 2003, Dowker was a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.[13]

She is currently a professor of Theoretical Physics and a member of the Theoretical Physics Group at Imperial College London and a Visiting Fellow at the Perimeter Institute.[14] She conducts research in a number of areas of theoretical physics including quantum gravity and causal set theory.[15][16][17]

Personal life

Dowker is the daughter of physicist Stuart Dowker, who worked at the University of Manchester.[18][19] She was interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili for The Life Scientific in 2017.[1]

She delivered the eulogy at Stephen Hawking's funeral, describing him as her "teacher, mentor and friend" and asserting that "his influence and legacy will live forever."[20]

References

  1. ^ a b Al-Khalili, Jim (2017). "Fay Dowker on a new theory of space-time". BBC.
  2. ^ a b Fay Dowker at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ a b c Dowker, Helen Fay (1990). Space-time wormholes. ethos.bl.uk (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge. OCLC 839406193.
  4. ^ Fay Dowker publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  5. ^ Dowker, Fay; Gauntlett, Jerome P.; Kastor, David A.; Traschen, Jennie (1994). "Pair creation of dilaton black holes". Physical Review D. 49 (6): 2909–2917. arXiv:hep-th/9309075. Bibcode:1994PhRvD..49.2909D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.49.2909. PMID 10017283. S2CID 15303024.
  6. ^ Dowker, Fay; Gauntlett, Jerome P.; Giddings, Steven B.; Horowitz, Gary T. (1994). "Pair creation of extremal black holes and Kaluza-Klein monopoles". Physical Review D. 50 (4): 2662–2679. arXiv:hep-th/9312172. Bibcode:1994PhRvD..50.2662D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.50.2662. PMID 10017899. S2CID 7270273.
  7. ^ Dowker, Fay; Gauntlett, Jerome P.; Gibbons, Gary W.; Horowitz, Gary T. (1995). "Decay of magnetic fields in Kaluza-Klein theory". Physical Review D. 52 (12): 6929–6940. arXiv:hep-th/9507143. Bibcode:1995PhRvD..52.6929D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.52.6929. PMID 10019234. S2CID 16857664.
  8. ^ Fay Dowker at IMDb
  9. ^ "A Brief History of Time at Manchester High". JLife Magazine. 12 November 2019. Retrieved 8 October 2023.
  10. ^ "Former Students". hawking.org.uk. Stephen Hawking. Archived from the original on 28 February 2009.
  11. ^ Dowker, Fay Page at Imperial College London
  12. ^ Dowker, Fay Personal webpage (last updated 2003) Archived 9 April 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  13. ^ History Theoretical Physics Group, Imperial College London
  14. ^ Fay Dowker, Perimeter Institute
  15. ^ Dowker, Fay (2013). "Introduction to causal sets and their phenomenology". General Relativity and Gravitation. 45 (9): 1651–1667. Bibcode:2013GReGr..45.1651D. doi:10.1007/s10714-013-1569-y. S2CID 119465367.
  16. ^ Dowker, Fay; Glaser, Lisa (2013). "Causal set d'Alembertians for various dimensions". Classical and Quantum Gravity. 30 (19): 195016. arXiv:1305.2588. Bibcode:2013CQGra..30s5016D. doi:10.1088/0264-9381/30/19/195016. S2CID 119181630.
  17. ^ Afshordi, Niayesh; Buck, Michel; Dowker, Fay; Rideout, David; Sorkin, Rafael D.; Yazdi, Yasaman K. (2012). "A ground state for the causal diamond in 2 dimensions". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2012 (10): 88. arXiv:1207.7101. Bibcode:2012JHEP...10..088A. doi:10.1007/JHEP10(2012)088. S2CID 119182974.
  18. ^ Anon (2015). "Stuart Dowker". University of Manchester. Archived from the original on 18 May 2017.
  19. ^ Dowker, Fay; Elizalde, Emilio; Kirsten, Klaus (2012). "Applications of zeta functions and other spectral functions in mathematics and physics: a special issue in honour of Stuart Dowker's 75th birthday". Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical. 45 (37): 370301. Bibcode:2012JPhA...45a0101D. doi:10.1088/1751-8113/45/37/370301. ISSN 1751-8113.
  20. ^ "Prof Stephen Hawking funeral: Legacy 'will live forever'". BBC News. 31 March 2018.