Marc Davis

Marc Davis (born 1947) is an American Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Davis received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, his Ph.D from Princeton University in 1973 and has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences (1991) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992). Davis taught for a year at Princeton, 1973–74, then served on the Astronomy faculty at Harvard from 1975 to 1981. Since 1981 he has been on the faculty of the Department of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Davis' work has been in physical cosmology and he has done a number of significant projects. While at Harvard, Davis led the CfA (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) galaxy survey, the first redshift survey of galaxies, which motivated his interest in N-body simulations of the Universe. In the 1980s, Davis, now at Berkeley, was part of a collaboration—with George Efstathiou, Carlos Frenk, and Simon White—that established the validity of the "cold dark matter" theory for the formation of galaxies and other cosmic structures, now the accepted interpretation in cosmology. In a classic series of papers, that collaboration—often called DEFW by their peers—used computer code to simulate the growth of the universe and resolve disputes among theoretical models. Through the 90's Davis worked on the theoretically expected large scale flow of galaxies and led the redshift survey of the first all-sky catalog, IRAS, with which he was able to estimate the flow of galaxies out to redshifts of order 6000 km/s. He took up this project once again in 2010 using the gravity field estimated from 2MASS, and he and Nusser were able to estimate the field to redshift of order 10,000 km/s. He was the lead principal investigator on the ambitious DEEP2 Redshift Survey of 50,000 high redshift galaxies. This was conducted on the ten-meter W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The scienti