Dr Jaco de Swart

Jaco de Swart is a historian and anthropologist of cosmology, and currently Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and Institute of Astronomy.

At the heart of de Swart’s work is the desire to engage with open problems and controversies in cosmology by tracing the history of its theories, ideas, and practices. He is finishing a monograph on the history of dark matter with MIT Press, and as a Marie Curie scholar is unfolding the entanglements between the search for dark matter particles and the environment. De Swart is also the Co-PI of the Templeton-funded neutrino experiment TAMBO (w/ Carlos Argüelles at Harvard University), where he leads the responsible siting team.

De Swart previously was American Institute of Physics Helleman Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Program in STS and Department of Physics, and a postdoc at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research with Annemarie Mol. He trained in theoretical physics (MSc) and philosophy (MA), and obtained his PhD in history of science at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute of Physics. He has held visiting positions at Princeton University, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, and U.C. Santa Cruz.

De Swart is a trained science communicator, and has told (hi)stories of cosmic conundrums at festivals, on TV, and in public lectures. Most recently, he was featured on a NOVA PBS documentary on decoding the universe.