Biography:



Lev Kofman is a Professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) at the University of Toronto and is now a CIAR Fellow. He received his M.Sc. in Theoretical Physics from Tartu University, Estonia in 1979. In 1984, he completed his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Astrophysics and Atmospheric Physics, Estonian Academy of Sciences, where he subsequently held a Fellowship (1983-7) and Senior Fellowship (1987-90).
Dr. Kofman moved to North America in 1991, joining the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), University of Toronto, as a Research Associate. The following year he lectured in Princeton University's Department of Astrophysical Sciences, and then returned for two more years to CITA, where he worked as a Research Fellow. During these years at CITA, he also joined CIAR as a Scholar. In 1993, Dr. Kofman took a position as an Associate Professor at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii before returning to CITA in 1998.
Dr. Kofman has served as the Head of the Advisory Committee on Estonia, Task Force on the FSU of the American Physical Society, and he has been a member of the Advisory Committee of the Task Force on the FSU of the American Astronomy Society. Dr. Kofman received the Soviet Medal for Young Investigators in Physics in 1987 and the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award in 2000.

Research Interests:
Dr. Kofman’s research interests have focused on the physics of the early universe, inflation, initial cosmological perturbations; reheating after inflation; origin, non-linear dynamics and statistics of the large scale structure of the Universe; cosmological models with dark matter; gravitational lensing; astrophysical jets. His newest interests include Superstring cosmology, supergravity cosmology, brane cosmology.