Dick Bond OC, O.Ont., FRS, FRSC, grew up in Toronto, graduating from the University of Toronto in 1973. He received his PhD from Caltech, became a lecturer at Berkeley, then a faculty member at Stanford. In 1985 he returned to the UofT as a founding faculty member in the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and a Fellow of the Cosmology and Gravity Program (C&G) of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He was awarded the title of University Professor in 2000. He served two terms as director of CITA (1996-2006) and three terms as C&G director (2002-17) and is currently a Senior Fellow in the CIFAR C&G successor program Gravity and the Extreme Universe. Bond has played a leading role in developing Canadian cosmology into its current vibrant state, and for making CITA a sought-after destination for over 180 post-PhD scientists, most in distinguished national and international faculty positions. In recognition of his national efforts, he became an Officer in the Order of Canada in 2005, was inducted into the Order of Ontario in 2008 and awarded The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.
His theoretical work ranges from the ultra-early to the ultra-late universe, with influential works on the nature and behaviour of dark matter and energy, on inflation in the early and late universe, on the “cosmic web” paradigm for the dynamics of structure formation from random density fields and the “gastrophysical” distribution and state of gas in the Universe that this engenders. He is best known for developing the theory and analysis of cosmic microwave background radiation fluctuations into a high precision tool for exploring the cosmos, applying the ideas as team member to a large fraction of all CMB experiments, including Boomerang, CBI, Acbar, ACTPol, Spider, and the satellite Planck for which he is a co-I and Canadian PI; and with much more to come in CMB and Large Scale Structure. "The world-wide push to solve the big questions about the universe has given me the joy of collaborating over the decades with a very large band of friends, in Toronto, in Canada, in the US and Europe, really great experimentalists and theorists all." says Bond. Over nearly four decades he has played a major role in the theoretical and experimental emergence of the SMc, the Standard Model of Cosmology, but his focus continues to be what lies Beyond the SMc: BSMc physics. Much of the cosmic lexicon originates with Bond, including cold, warm, hot dark matter, cosmic web, gastrophysics, forecasting future experiments, primary and secondary CMB anisotropies. For his work Bond has been honoured with almost all major Canadian awards, including the top five for career achievement: the 1995 Beals Prize of the Canadian Astronomical Society, the 2006 Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, the 2007 Killam Prize in the Natural Sciences, the 2009 Tory Medal of the Canadian Royal Society and the 2010 Canadian Association of Physicists Medal for Lifetime Achievement. His international awards include the 2002 Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society and the 2008 Gruber Laureate in Cosmology. |