Joao Magueijo

Imperial College, London

Joao Magueijo studied physics at the University of Lisbon. He undertook graduate work and PhD at Cambridge University. He was awarded a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, the same fellowship previously held by Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam. He has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College London where he teaches undergraduates "General Relativity" and postgraduates "Advanced General Relativity". In 1998, Magueijo teamed with Andreas Albrecht to work on the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology, which proposes that the speed of light was much higher in the early universe, of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value. This would to explain the horizon problem (since distant regions of the expanding universe would have had time to interact and homogenize their properties), and is presented as an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation. Magueijo discusses his personal struggles pursuing VSL in his 2003 book, *Faster Than The Speed of Light, The Story of a Scientific Speculation*. He is also the host of the Science Channel series, *Joao Magueijo's Big Bang*, which premiered on May 13, 2008.