Carnegie Mellon University

The McWilliams Center for Cosmology at Carnegie Mellon University is a synergy of research in particle physics, astrophysics, computer science, and statistics to advance our understanding of the dark part of the universe.

Visible matter – from the smallest star to the largest galaxy – makes up only a small fraction of the matter in the universe. An elusive dark matter and a dark energy form the bulk of the universe.

Researchers at The McWilliams Center for Cosmology address some of the fundamental questions needed to uncover the nature of the dark part of the universe:

  • What is the universe made of?
  • What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?
  • How did the universe evolve to its present state?

To explore these questions, researchers at the Center are using a variety of observational, experimental, theoretical and computational approaches. Research areas include studies of the evolution of galaxies and the formation of large-scale structure using the latest tools in data-mining, statistics, and computer science; experiments that will search for dark matter particles at the Large Hadron Collider; and efforts to develop and run cosmological simulations at the peta-scale.

The McWilliams Center for Cosmology fosters collaboration within Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Physics, the School of Computer Science, the Department of Statistics and the Software Engineering Institute and among partner institutions including the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh.