Amanda Weltman, born in 1979 in Cape Cod, Massachussettes, USA is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town. She completed her PhD under the supervision of Brian Greene at Columbia University, USA in 2007 and joined both the faculty at the University of Cape Town and took up a postdoctoral position at DAMTP in Cambridge UK that same year. In the last few years she has won several awards including the National Women in Science award for the Best Emerging Young Researcher in the Natural Sciences and Engineering in 2009, The University of Cape Town Faculty of Science Young Researcher award as well as the College of Fellows Young Researcher award, 2010. In 2011 she was the recipient of the Meiring Naude Medal from the Royal Society of South Africa.
Her research is in the growing area of String Cosmology with the goal of using the sky as the ultimate testing ground for testing String Theory. She is most well known for proposing the Chameleon field - a particle that could be responsible for causing the observed accelerated expansion of the universe while also causing interesting and unexpected local and solar system physics effects that could be observed in purpose built experiments.
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