“That’s what science does. At the end there’s a result based on maths and logic. If one is equal to one, we can all agree on that. Maths don’t lie.”

Claudia de Rham is a Swiss theoretical physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology and particle physics. She is based at Imperial College London. Professor de Rham is well known for her groundbreaking research into the theory of massive gravity, a radical theory that contends, contra to Einstein's theory of general relativity, that the graviton has a nonzero mass, thereby explaining the expansion of the universe without the need for dark energy. She was one of the UK finalists in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2018 for revitalizing the theory of massive gravity, and won the award in 2020.

In addition to her pioneering research, de Rham has found the time to train as a pilot and made it through several stages of the European Space Agency’s astronaut selection process.

"De Rham has pioneered a radical theory that could hold the key to why the universe is expanding faster and faster and explain the nature of dark energy."  Hannah Devlin