Rahman Amanullah is a researcher in observational cosmology at the Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University.  He defended his PhD thesis in 2006 and spent the following two years as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California in Berkeley working with the Supernova Cosmology Project.

In his research, Rahman has focused on trying to understand the Universe on its largest scales.  He is using supernovae, stars that end their lives in an explosion, as standard candles to measure cosmological distances.  Such measurements were originally used to discover the accelerated expansion of the Universe which was awarded by the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.  There is no natural explanation for this phenomenon in our current understanding of nature.  By tracing the behaviour of the acceleration for different epochs in the cosmic history, together with his colleagues, Rahman is hoping to discover new physics at the fundamental level.

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