Amare Abebe

After completing his postgraduate training specialising in gravitation and cosmology at UCT, Amare Abebe joined the NWU as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2014 and has remained here ever since, where he is now a professor of physics and the current director of the Centre for Space Research (CSR). His research focuses on understanding the origin and evolution of the universe - and the formation of large-scale structure, i.e., structures larger than individual galaxies, in it – using alternative theories of gravitational physics and observational constraints from astronomical data. Part of this endeavour is to explain (away) dark matter and dark energy, two components of matter and energy that, together, account for nearly 95% of the total content of the universe despite being invisible - hence simply referred to as dark – but whose existence is inferred through their gravitational and cosmological effects.