Joseph Ivor Silk is the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford. He came back to the UK in 1999 to take up the position, following a nearly 30-year career at the University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at Tottenham County School (1954-1960) and Cambridge University (1960-1963). He held distinguished positions in Munich, Paris, Groningen and Baltimore. Professor Silk, a post-graduate of Harvard, has given more than two hundred invited conference lectures, primarily on galaxy formation and cosmology.
He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford.[1] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected May 1999)
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The structure of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies is principally determined by two effects: acoustic oscillations and diffusion damping (also called collisionless damping or Silk damping). The latter is named Silk damping after Joseph Silk.
Silk has over 500 publications, of which 3 have been cited over 400 times, 20 have been published in Nature and 11 in Science.[2]