Professor Roy Maartens

Professor Maartens obtained his PhD from UCT in 1980 and was a Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1984-94. He joined the University of Portsmouth in the UK where he was the founding Director of the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation, which became one of the top cosmology research groups in the UK and internationally. From 2002 to 2005 he held a National Senior Research Fellowship from the UK Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council. He returned to South Africa in 2011 to take up a SARChI Research Chair at UWC, one of five national Chairs that are affiliated to the South African SKA (Square Kilometre Array) Project.

He built an Astrophysics Group in the Department of Physics, now the Department of Physics & Astronomy. The Group now has six academic research staff and more than 30 researchers at postdoctoral, PhD and MSc levels. In 2012, he received his first NRF A-rating for his research in Cosmology, which was also the first A-rating at UWC. It was renewed in 2018 and again in 2024. In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of the International Society for General Relativity & Gravitation.

His research focuses on extracting information from the distribution of millions of galaxies, which contain a ‘fossil’ record from the very early Universe, as well as the imprints at later times of Dark Energy and Dark Matter. This information is used to study the origins and evolution of the Universe. He has published more than 250 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, with an h-index of 75.