Céline Bœhm

Bœhm studied fundamental physics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, graduating in 1997.[2] She joined École Polytechnique, where she was ranked first in the year for a Masters in engineering in 1998.[2] She earned the highest distinction for a postgraduate diploma in theoretical physics.[2] She completed her PhD at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 2001, working with Pierre Fayet. She worked on supersymmetry and was the first to predict the 4-body decay of the stop particle. She studied light scalar top quark and supersymmetric dark matter.[3] She looked at collisional damping, which considers the impact of dark matter and standard model particles with the cosmic microwave background.[4]

In 2001 Bœhm joined Joseph Silk at the University of Oxford. Here she worked on light dark matter particles which couple to light Z′ bosons.[5] She proposed new candidates for scalar dark matter, in the form of heavy fermions or light gauge bosons.[6] When the SPI spectrometer onboard INTEGRAL identified a 511 keV line in the Galactic Center, Bœhm predicted that this could have been the signature of dark matter.[7] She has continued to search for new signatures of dark matter, including examining the GeV excess in the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope data.[8][9][10] In 2004 Bœhm joined the Laboratoire d'Annecy-le-Vieux de Physique Théorique, where she was promoted to senior lecturer in 2008.[11] She was awarded the Centre national de la recherche scientifique Bronze Medal.[11]

She looked at the analysis of the CoGeNT direct detection method, and found that it could have suffered from a large background.[12] In 2015 Boehm was nominated as Fellow of the Institute of Physics. She is the Principal investigator of the Theia mission, a space observatory which will allow Bœhm and her team to test the dark matter predictions that arise due to the Lambda-CDM model.[13][14]

Boehm was made an Emmy Noether Fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in 2016, where she continued to work on dark matter.[15][16] That year, she was promoted to Professor in the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology at Durham University. She gave a TED talk, The Invisible is All What Matters, at Durham in 2017.[17] Alongside her work in astroparticle physics, she works on non-crystallographic Coxeter groups.[18][19] She led the dark matter working package of the Euclid Consortium. In 2017 Bœhm spent two months as a visiting professor at Columbia University, as well as working at the Paris Observatory. She proposed using circular polarisation to study dark matter and neutrinos.[20] She joined the University of Sydney as Head of School for physics in 2018.[21][2] Bœhm has written for The Conversation.[22] She has taken part in Pint of Science.[23]