Simon Lilly

Career and research Following his PhD, Lilly was a SERC/NATO postdoctoral research Fellow at Princeton University from 1984 to 1985. He was appointed assistant professor and then associate professor at the University of Hawaii from 1985 to 1990, then full professor at the University of Toronto from 1990 to 2000. He served as Director General of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics from 2000 to 2002. That year, he was appointed Professor at ETH Zurich in 2002, in a dual appointment with his wife Marcella Carollo. He served as Head of the Department of Physics at ETH from 2015 to 2017. With the zCOSMOS project, Lilly has sought to identify the physical processes that shape the properties of galaxies over cosmic time in different space environments.

Controversy In August 2017, ETH Zurich dissolved its institute for astronomy. According to news reports in NZZ am Sonntag and Science the closure of the institute followed allegations of misconduct in the Institute by Lilly's Italian-Swiss wife, Marcella Carollo. A subsequent investigation by ETH cleared Lilly of any misconduct but not Carollo, who was dismissed.

Awards and honours Lilly was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014, with the citation noting that his early work "provided the first convincing measurement of the star formation history of the Universe."

He was awarded the 2017 Herschel Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society, in recognition of his work on the Canada-France Redshift Survey, which "provided the first measurement of the luminosity density of normal galaxies over cosmological timescales [and] motivated the follow-up census at higher redshifts with the first Hubble Deep Field."

In 2017 and again in 2018, he was identified as a Highly Cited Researcher for his research work at ETH.