![](https://images.prismic.io/springpod-prod/13a646d1-a71c-44a0-8c64-6f29ae144eb6_Academic-headshots.jpg?auto=compress,format)
Professor Daniel Thomas is Professor of Astrophysics in the Faculty of Technology, and the Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Portsmouth. Daniel did his PhD in Astrophysics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany, with research on the chemical evolution and stellar populations of early-type galaxies. After post-doctoral research positions at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Max-Planck-Institute for extraterrestrial physics (Garching, Germany) and Oxford University (UK), he joined the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in 2007. Daniel’s research broadly addresses the formation and evolution of galaxies and galaxies as cosmological probes with particular interests in stellar populations and chemical evolution, galaxy populations, large-scale galaxy surveys, galaxy environment, galaxy dynamics and dark matter. He was involved and held leadership positions in a number of large-scale galaxy surveys including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Survey. Daniel co-founded the Citizen-science project Galaxy Zoo. Daniel has co-authored over 300 scientific publications. He joined the 2020 Highly Cited Researchers™ list from Clarivate™ identifying researchers ranking in the top 1% by citations, demonstrating significant influence among their peers. Daniel is currently in 25th place of the national ranking of top physicists by research.com, and among the top two per cent of the most cited scholars in the world according to a list produced by Stanford University and Elsevier.