Prof. Amanda Weltman is presently the NRF/DHEST South African Research Chair in Physical Cosmology, at the Department of Mathematics & Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town. She is also the Director of the High Energy Physics, Cosmology & Astrophysics Theory group (HEPCAT).

She completed her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Brian Greene at Columbia University, NYC, USA in 2007 and joined both the faculty at the University of Cape Town and took up a prestigious Centre for Theoretical Cosmology postdoctoral position at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University in the UK that same year. After almost a decade abroad, her devotion to South Africa brought Prof. Weltman back to South Africa in 2009 to build the education and science sectors of the country. She believes deeply in the importance of science and mathematics education as the cornerstones to a knowledge economy and is committed to being a part of building South Africa’s bright future.

Weltman has made seminal and path-breaking contributions to the field of theoretical cosmology, earning a reputation as an innovative theorist relentlessly committed to building the connection between theory and experiment. In particular, her discovery and development of the chameleon mechanism stands out as a landmark development in contemporary cosmological physics. She continues to pioneer work in this field with parallel leadership roles both in ongoing theoretical development of chameleon physics and in frontier experimental and astrophysical searches including CERNs International Axion Observatory (IAXO); the forthcoming Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX), and South Africa’s flagship Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project. More recently, she has turned her attention to the immense potential for discovery using Fast Radio Bursts as measuring tools of the universe. Her work has been cited over 8000 times.

Since her return to SA in 2009, Prof. Weltman has won several national awards for her research and her contributions to the public understanding of science, including the National Women in Science award for the Best Emerging Young Researcher in the Natural Sciences and Engineering, the Meiring Naude Medal from the Royal Society of South Africa, the NSTF-BHP Billiton, TW Kambule Award To an Emerging Researcher for an outstanding contribution to SETI through Research and its Outputs, the Silver Jubilee medal from the South African Institute of Physics and the Inaugural Next Einstein Fellows award. She held a coveted Presidential rating from the National Research Foundation. She is currently also an ICTP Trieste Simons Associate and serves on the Scientific Advisory board for the ICTP- EAIFR in Rwanda as well as the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITHECS) of South Africa.