ABOUT ME
     

Henk Hoekstra is a professor at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. His main area of research is observational cosmology, with a particular focus on the study of dark matter and dark energy using weak gravitational lensing. Since 2011 he is a cosmology coordinator for Euclid, the ESA mission to study the nature of dark energy and many other aspects of our current cosmological paradigm.

After completing his PhD (cum laude) at the University of Groningen in 2000, he moved to Canada, initially as a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. In 2004 he moved to the University of Victoria as an assistant professor and a scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 2007 Henk Hoekstra was awarded a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He returned to his native country in 2008 to join the faculty of Leiden Observatory. In this year he was awarded a Vidi grant by the Dutch funding agency NWO and a Marie Curie international reintegration grant from the European Union. In 2011 he received a starting grant from the European Research Council to fund his research on the KiloDegree Survey and to advance the accuracy of weak lensing measurements. The next step, in preparation for the launch of Euclid, is to advance shape measurement algorithms and measure intrinsic alignments. The latter makes use of data from the PAUCam Survey and this research is supported thanks to a NWO Vici grant awarded in 2016. As of August 2017 he is a full professor in observational cosmology.

 

 
 

Academic Career

1995 MSc (cum laude) Groningen
2000 PhD (cum laude) Groningen
  Postdoctoral Fellow, CITA, University of Toronto
2002 Senior Research Associate, CITA, University of Toronto
2004 Assistant Professor, University of Victoria
2008 Assistant Professor, Leiden University
2010 Associate Professor, Leiden University
2017 Full Professor, Leiden University
 

 

Grants and Awards

2001 Beatrice D. Tremaine Fellowship
2007 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship
2008 EU International Reintegration Grant
  NWO Vidi Grant
2011 ERC Starting Grant
2016 NWO Vici Grant
 
 

Selected publications

  1. H. Hoekstra, R. Herbonnet, A. Muzzin, A. Babul, A. Mahdavi, M. Viola & M. Cacciato, "The Canadian Cluster Comparison Projects: detailed study of systematics and updated weak lensing masses", MNRAS, 449, 685 (2015)
  2. E. Semboloni, H. Hoekstra, J. Schaye, M.P. van Daalen & I.G. McCarthy, "Quantifying the effect of baryon physics on weak lensing tomography", MNRAS, 417, 2020 (2011)
  3. H. Hoekstra et al., "First cosmic shear results from the CFHT wide synoptic legacy survey", ApJ, 647, 116 (2006)
  4. H. Hoekstra, H.K.C. Yee, & M.D. Gladders, "Properties of galaxy dark matter halos from weak lensing", ApJ, 606, 67 (2004)
  5. H. Hoekstra, M. Franx, K. Kuiken, G. Squires, "Weak lensing analysis of CL1358+62 using HST observations", ApJ, 504, 636 (1998)
 
 

Contact Information

Leiden Observatory

Oortgebouw, room 457

2333 CA Leiden

The Netherlands

email: hoekstra@strw.leidenuniv.nl

tel: +31 (0)71 5275594