Speaker Profile
Claudia de Rham is a theoretical physicist based at Imperial College London. Her work at the interface of gravity, cosmology and particle physics won her the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2020. She is tireless campaigner against the underrepresentation of girls in physics and frequently speaks in schools and for other organisations about diversity in the sciences.
Her book The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity tells the fascinating personal story of de Rham’s quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature. An aspiring astronaut whose opportunity to go into space was unexpectedly snatched away from her, de Rham has instead played with gravity as a diver, a pilot and – above all – an award-winning researcher who, in redirecting her energy towards physics, made an breakthrough at the very frontiers of gravitational science.