William Nelson joins us from Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where he has been a Marie Curie Research Fellow leading a project in Quantum Cosmology. William was previously a post-doctorate research scientist in the U.S. at Penn State, where he designed computational and analytic models of the evolution of cosmic strings and other phenomena, and developed and extended non-commutative geometry to predict gravitational wave propagation. He received his PhD in Mathematical Physics from King’s College in London, developing the phenomenology of string theory and loop quantum gravity in the early universe, which was awarded the thesis prize and was funded by an Oliver Cromwell scholarship.
William earned a Masters in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and a Masters in Theoretical Physics at the University of York. He has published 26 papers in academic journals and presented at many international conferences. Recently, in his spare time William has written children’s stories for his nieces and nephews. William has traveled through each continent except Antarctica, and he returns periodically to his hometown of Schull, County Cork, in southwest Ireland. Having sailed recreationally and competitively since childhood, William can affirm or dispute the old blessing: May the wind always be at your back.