Barth Netterfield

How old is the universe? What is its history? What is it made of?

These questions are central to the research of cosmologist Barth Netterfield, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Toronto. For 30 years it’s been expected that the key to these questions would lie in detailed images of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the light from the primordial plasma, which filled the universe after the Big Bang.

In his most recent project, Netterfield, along with a multinational collaboration, went to Antartica to fly the 1500 kg BOOMERANG telescope 37 km to above the earth on a 10-day flight at the edge of space to image this plasma. Results from this experiment have gone a long way to answer many of the fundamental long-standing questions of cosmology.

Netterfield is the principal investigator for the Canadian component of BOOMERANG, a Sloan fellow, and a scholar with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Study.

He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, and was a Millikan post-doctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology before returning to Canada in 1999 as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.