Professor J. Richard Bond Accepts the 2025 Shaw Prize in Astrophysics

(From left to right) Professor Kenji Fukaya, Professor Wolfgang Baumeister, Professor Reinhard Genzel, Professor George Efstathiou and Professor John Richard Bond at the Shaw Prize Award Presentation Ceremony 2025.

On October 21st CITA Professor J. Richard Bond accepted the 2025 Shaw Prize in Astrophysics, shared with Professor George Efstathiou from the University of Cambridge. The Shaw Foundation recognized the four 2025 Shaw Laureates at a special award presentation ceremony in the Grand Hall of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The awards were presented by Professor Reinhard Genzel, Chair of the Board of Adjudicators. Each Shaw Prize also carries a monetary award of US$1.2 million.

Professors Bond and Efstathiou, recognised for their studies of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, reminisced about their decades-long friendship and collaboration. They celebrated their personal and intellectual connections, and global network of collaborators that shaped their work.

Acceptance Speech Shaw Prize 2025: J. Richard Bond

When George and I heard about the 2025 Shaw Prize we were on our way to CMB@60, celebrating all that the ﬁrst light of the universe has revealed since its ﬁrst discovery. Perfect timing, and great for the ﬁeld. We collaborated on dark matter in 1980 in Berkeley, did the CMB transport work, building codes from foundational ﬁrst principles for all of the components of the universe in Cambridge, Stanford, Santa Barbara, CITA and Oxford. We joined hands with CMB experimentalists in small now large teams to develop novel analysis methods for what became a CMB data ﬂood, through the many signal detection campaigns of the 90s, 00s, 10s and now 20s, including ~3 decades of the Planck satellite, and, for me, ~2 decades of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. “Movable feasts” of ideas and results and fun with so many friends of all ages in the ﬁeld.

Two institutes have been crucial to four decades of intense work back in Canada on all manner cosmic, from emergence in the ultra-early universe to the ultra-late entangled cosmic web, and everything in between. First is CITA, the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics based at the University of Toronto, where we have been home to over 250 CITAzens: postdocs – our special niche – professors, and grad students, with a large fraction now playing major roles in the astro world, and at Canadian universities, including the many who collaborated with me on the Cosmic SuperWeb that binds us all together: as we say, “once a CITAzen always a CITAzen”.

The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, CIFAR, is the other. We chose our Fellows and guests well, bringing them to exotic locales across Canada: 9 Shaw Laureates in Astronomy, 2 Nobels in Physics! And those not even the most famous. George was a Fellow for a few decades, and I am delighted to point out three more here today, Professors Alex Szalay, Carlos Frenk and Shaw Laureate Simon White: we have all been well entangled cosmically and in friendship for 45 years, in this golden age of cosmology. In that spirit, I raise a virtual glass at this Shaw movable feast: gān bēi aka”干杯”.

And a special raising of the spirits to Karin, my wife, and to Rosanne and Bruce, my sister and brother-in-law, gān bēi to you.