Vasily
Belokurov

Vasily Belokurov was born and grew up in Moscow, studying astronomy at Moscow State University. In 2000 he went to Oxford University on a scholarship to pursue a PhD, studying micro-lensing and making predictions for ESA's Gaia mission. Three years later, armed with a computer he had built for classifying micro-lensing events, he moved to Cambridge to carry out postdoctoral research at the university's Institute of Astronomy. He has been at Cambridge ever since, becoming a lecturer in 2011 and a professor in 2019.

Throughout his career, Belokurov has used large astronomical datasets to uncover the structure, history and dark-matter content of the Milky Way. In 2006 he helped produce the “Field of Streams”, a map of old halo stars that revealed the remnants of smaller systems torn apart during the galaxy's growth. The map supported the cold-dark-matter picture of galaxy formation and showed that stellar streams could be used to trace the galaxy’s otherwise invisible dark-matter distribution. Then in 2018, he and colleagues used measurements of halo stars' orbits from the Gaia satellite to identify the Gaia-Enceladus Sausage – the Milky Way's most important ancient collision, which has become central to our understanding of galactic evolution.

In recognition of his work, Belokurov has received the Aaronson Prize from the University of Arizona and the Fowler Award from the Royal Astronomical Society