Simon Frederik Portegies Zwart#
| Membership Number: | 7481 |
| Membership type: | ORDINARY |
| Section: | EARTH & COSMIC SCIENCES |
| Affiliated section(s): | PHYSICS |
| Elected: | 2026 |
| Main Country of Residence: | THE NETHERLANDS |
| Homepage(s): | http://home.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~spz/index.html |
| ORCID: | 0000-0001-5839-0302 |
| Publication Link: | https://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-abs_connect?author=%22Portegies%20Zwart%2C%20S%22&db_key=AST |
Present and Previous Positions
- 2013 - 2022 Visiting Scientist at RIKEN, Kobe, Japan
- August - December 2018, Visiting Professor, Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), Toronto, Canada
- 2009 - present Professor of Computational Astrophysics, Leiden University, Netherlands
- 2007 - 2009 Assistant Professor Computational Science and Astrophysics, University of Amsterdam
- 2002 - 2007 Royal Netherlands Academy Fellow (Assistant Professor, Computational Science and Astrophysics), University of Amsterdam
- 1-1998 - 2002 NASA Hubble Fellow (postdoctoral fellow), Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University
- 1-1997 - 1998 JSPS Fellow (Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science), Computational Science, University of Tokyo, Japan
- 1996 - 1997 Spinoza postdoctoral fellow, Anton Pannekoek Institute of Astronomy, University of Amsterdam
Fields of Scholarship
- Formation of gravitational wave sources (black hole binaries) by evolution of dense star clusters
- Computational Astrophysics
- Astrophysics
- Intermediate-mass black hole formation by dynamical processes in dense star clusters
- Dynamical evolution combined with internal evolution of the stars in stellar populations, including binaries
- High Performance Computing (HPC)
- Population synthesis evolution of stellar systems with binaries
- Gravitational dynamical evolution of stellar systems (star clusters, galaxies)
- Solar System dynamics and evolution
- Supermassive black-hole formation by dynamical processes in galaxies
Honours and Awards
- 2025 -Minor Planet 12946 named "Portegies Zwart", by the International Astronomical Union (IAU)
- 2022 IEEE HPC Innovation Excellence Award
- 2017 Member of Royal Hollands Society of Sciences (Koninklijke Hollandse Maatschappij van Wetenschappen, oldest Science Academy of the Netherlands)
- 2016 Innovation Award of NWO (Netherlands Science Foundation) and SURF (Netherlands Universities High Performance Computing collaboration)
- 2014 IEEE Gordon Bell Prize nomination (Nr. 2 out of 500 nominees; together with his PhD student J.Bedorf), for their world-record performance of 24.8 Petaflops with > 90% efficiency on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputer Titan, for simulating the Milky Way galaxy on a star by star basis
- 2014 Wim Nieuwpoort Prize for Outstanding High Performance Computing, of Netherlands Science Foundation NWO
- 2008 VICI Grant (1.5Million Euros prize research grant ) of Netherlands Science Foundation NWO
- 2007 Pastor Schmeits Prize 2007 (Prize for most outstanding Netherlands astronomer younger than 45)
- 2002 Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) Fellowship (5 yr Assistant Professor salary).
- 1998 NASA Hubble Fellowship (4 yr post-doctoral fellowship, for working at MIT and Boston University)
- 1997 JSPS postdoctoral fellowship (one year postdoctoral fellowship, of Japanese Society for the promotion of Science), for working in Computational Science at Tokyo University
