Today at Brown

On a steamy August night in Nicosia, Cyprus, when Savvas Koushiappas was five years old, his father rolled out a blanket in the family’s backyard and the two spent the night gazing at the Perseid meteor shower in the heavens above.

“I didn’t know where [the shooting stars] were going to fall. On my head? On my home?” Koushiappas recalls.

Thirty-one years later, Koushiappas, a theoretical astrophysicist, cosmologist and a new assistant professor of physics at Brown, has not lost his sense of wonderment or his fascination with the fabric of the universe.

“People are fascinated by the sky,” he says. “They’ve always been.”

Koushiappas studies structures in the universe. The scope of his inquiry extends to the hunt for dark matter, an elusive element that cosmologists believe makes up at least 22 percent of the universe. By contrast, the elements in all the things we can see — planets, humans, bacteria and so forth — is believed to constitute just four percent of the universe. (The remaining 74 percent is dark energy, scientists believe, another phenomenon that is completely unknown at present.)

There are strong theoretical arguments that point to the fact that there is a wealth of “new physics” behind the concept of dark matter, Koushiappas says. “Today, we are much better armed with the language of mathematics, and we can probe that question more clearly.”

Although Koushiappas was introduced to science early, he didn’t begin studying physics until he was 24 years old. In the meantime, he played the trumpet for the Cyprus State Orchestra.

“I always wanted to do physics,” he says.

He began to make good on his goal when he enrolled at the University of New Mexico, graduating with a B.S. in astrophysics. He earned his Ph.D. from Ohio State University and went to work as a postdoctoral research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

At Brown, he will teach a new course that examines how stars are structured and how they evolve from birth to death. In between, he is excited to analyze data from the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), which will help cosmologists better understand the birth and early evolution of the universe, search for dark matter, and allow physicists to study subatomic particles at energies far greater than those seen in ground-based particle accelerators.