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.