Andrew Benson is a Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Observatories. His research program is focused on understanding the nature of dark matter and the process of galaxy formation, with a particular emphasis on formulating a coherent picture of the many different aspects of these problems. He has developed a model of dark matter and galaxy formation physics, Galacticus, which is available to the community as an open source project. The approach blends both analytic understanding and significant number-crunching that utilizes both in-house and external compute clusters.
Benson received his M.S. in physics at the University of Leicester and his Ph. D. in astrophysics from the University of Durham. Before coming to Carnegie in 2012, he was a research fellow at the University of Oxford and at Caltech. For more information see https://abensonca.github.io