Shaun Cole

I was born in the north west of England in November 1963. Until the age of 19, I lived in the rural Lancashire village of Chipping, with my sister Carolyn (1958-) and our parents Vic (1921-) and Marion (1933-1999). Our parents were both from East Anglia, but moved to the north of England for my father's job soon after they were married. He worked as a weaving technologist for the customer service department of Courtaulds, which at that time was the world's largest producer of man made fibres. He travelled daily around weaving mills of Lancashire and beyond. Occasionally I spent the day travelling with him visiting local mills a couple of which still had impressive Victorian steam engines which once powered the noisy weaving looms.

The village of Chipping is mentioned in the Doomsday Book of 1086 and dates back at least 1000 years. One notable Chipping resident was the philanthropist John Brabin, a London cloth merchant and dyer. He set up a shop in the village in 1668 trading dyed cloth. He died in 1683 and through his will set up a trust which in 1684 founded the village school which I attended almost 300 years later. In the 1970s it was still a small school with just 3 teachers and 50 pupils, but was still serving the community. Most of my memories of this time are of my friends and I exploring the farms and countryside around the village. We used to cycle for miles to the surrounding hills, rivers and streams which were our playground.

At the age of 12 I progressed to the local state grammar school at Clitheroe -- founded by Queen Mary in 1554. The daily bus journey from Chipping to Clitheroe was via 12 miles of country roads. We were notorious for being late to the school morning assembly as at certain times of year the bus would get delayed behind multiple herds of cows as they walked down the roads to and from milking. It is was at Clitheroe Royal Grammar School (CRGS) that my interest and aptitude for maths and physics began to develop. I struggled with some subjects, particularly English, but found physics and maths much simpler and easy to master. I had some inspiring teachers, particularly Mr Proctor in maths and Mr Davy in physics, who stretched and challenged me and my classmates. Towards the end of my time at CRGS, my teachers encouraged me to apply for a university place at Oxbridge (Oxford/Cambridge). I broke a tradition of CRGS sending a few pupils to Cambridge every year by opting to seek a place at Oxford. My preference for Oxford was that at the time, of the two, only Oxford taught Astronomy as an optional part of their physics degree. Having grown up with the Apollo moon landings and Star Trek, I was fascinated by space and astronomy and wanted to learn more about the Universe, before, as I thought at the time, settling into a normal non-academic career.

In 1982, I secured a place at Jesus College to read physics and opted to take all the astronomy options offered in the Oxford physics degree. After my sheltered rural childhood, I initially found Oxford very alien and intimidating, but by the second term I'd made some good friends and settled into the ancient routines of Oxford life. The rooms I had in Jesus college were once occupied by 60's and 70's prime minster Harold Wilson and Lawrence of Arabia.In my final year I specialised in theoretical physics and astrophysics, but I think the long hours spent in the teaching laboratories in the first and second year helped me immensely in being able to develop an intuitive picture of how physical systems described by equations and formulae behave in practice. I graduated with first class honours in 1985. (By the time I graduated there were three other students from CRGS studying at Jesus College.)

At this stage I still didn't have a clear career plan, but I was keen to continue learning more astronomy and physics. There was no pressure on me to get "a real job", as at the time further University study was still fully funded by the state. I applied for a few PhD places, but opted to first take a place on the one-year "Part III" course of the Cambridge Mathematics Tripos at the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics (turning down an opportunity to start a PhD with John Peacock in Edinburgh!). At Cambridge I became a member of Clare College, where I made many life long friends. A distinction in Part III enabled me to secure a studentship (funded by the Science and Engineering Research Council, SERC) to read for a PhD at Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy (IoA). Set amongst trees and gardens in the west of Cambridge the IoA was a wonderful place to study. My PhD supervisors were Nick Kaiser and George Efstathiou. They guided me through a series of projects on galaxy clusters, gravitational lensing and galaxy formation which became the basis for my thesis, "The Evolution of Large Scale Structure and Galaxy Formation". The final year of my PhD was spent back in Oxford as George Efstathiou had moved from Cambridge to Oxford to take up the Savilian Chair of Astronomy, while Nick Kaiser had moved to the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Toronto.

This year, 1989, back in Oxford was an important one in my life. In the early spring while on a Andorran skiing holiday with some of my Clare College friends I met Maggie, my wife to be. Upon returning to England we met regularly and she kept me sane during the stressful period in 1989 when I was writing up my PhD thesis. At this stage I'd already accepted a two year postdoctoral position at the University of California in Berkeley. Although separated for months by thousands of miles we stayed close via countless letters and phone calls. Over these two years Maggie visited California several times and we enjoyed multiple camping and road trips visiting some of the amazing natural wonders of the western USA, including Yosemite valley , the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Crater Lake and giant redwood groves. These were the highlights of my time in California. We became engaged in 1990.

The Astronomy department at Campbell Hall in Berkeley was a very scientifically productive place to work. My mentors there, Joe Silk and Marc Davis, provided a seemingly endless stream of interesting ideas to work on. It was an exciting period in astronomy marked by the launch of Hubble Space Telescope and COBE satellite which made the first all sky map of the temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. At Berekley one felt part of these innovations due to its strong links with both these mission through staff members Ivan King and George Smoot. While in Berkeley, I also began lasting collaborations with fellow postdocs David Weinberg and Cedric Lacey.

Having been a keen cyclist from an early age the first thing I bought in Berkeley was a mountain bike (Trek 980). At this time mountain biking was quite novel outside the USA, but it had its roots in California and was a popular past time while I was there. I used my bike to get to and from Campbell Hall everyday, but also spent many weekends mountain biking on the excellent trails in the surrounding Berkeley and Oakland hills. A workshop I attended in Aspen Colorado in the summer 1991 was memorable as much for the excellent mountain biking as the scientific discussion.

In September 1991 I returned to England and with Maggie moved to Durham, a small, beautiful medieval city in the North East of England, where I was appointed to a combined postdoc and teaching position working with Carlos Frenk and Richard Ellis. Maggie and I were married the following year, celebrating our wedding with family and friends in the Derbyshire village of Bamford close to Maggie's home city, Sheffield. Our first house in Durham was in need of some modernisation and this necessity prompted Maggie and I to become reasonably adept at Do-It-Yourself (DIY) projects. Over the years we have fitted three kitchens, two bathrooms, laid driveways, built rockeries and carried out many more DIY projects .

Our daughter Hannah was born in December 1993 and our son Daniel in 1999 on the day of Hannah's sixth birthday party. The two of them have grown up in Durham. At the local Durham Johnston school, Hannah excelled at Information Technology and Media Studies. She is keen on film and we became regular cinema goers, attending many previews and premiers with her before she started University. She is now studying Media Production at Bournemouth University on the south coast of England. Daniel is currently attending Durham Johnston school where his main interests are science and computing. Recently Daniel has become a keen cyclist. After a 22 year break, this has prompted me to once again buy a mountain bike in a forlorn attempt to keep up with him on the challenging trails at the nearby Hamsterley forest.

Our summer holidays have always been a annual family highlight. Always meticulously organised by Maggie We have spent many family holidays camping and touring in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe. One exception was in 2008 when we treated ourselves to a one off extended holiday in the USA. We started by touring California, Nevada and Arizona showing Hannah and Daniel, Yosemite Valley, Death Valley the Grand Canyon and other sites we'd visited when we were younger. Although we all enjoyed the whole holiday, the highlights for Hannah and Daniel were the Florida theme parks we visited in the second half of our holiday.

I have had various positions during my career in Durham. I was a PPARC Advanced Fellow from 1994 to 2001 when I was appointed to the Durham Physics department faculty. During this time I worked with my Durham colleagues on developing a useful analytic model describing the hierarchical growth of structure in the standard cold dark matter model. In this model gravity first pulls dark matter into small bound clumps which then merge together over cosmic time to form successive generations of more massive dark matter clumps or halos. Cedric Lacey and I developed an approximate analytic description of this process and simple way of generating merger trees describing the formation of individual haloes. This framework led to a larger collaboration with my Durham colleagues to build a complete model of galaxy formation in a full cosmological setting. We developed the semi-analytic model GALFORM which modelled the heating and cooling processes of gas bound in dark matter haloes, the formation of angular momentum supported galactic discs, the star formation which occurs in these discs and the feedback on the surrounding gas caused by supernovae energy released young stellar populations. This technique also included modelling of star bursts and the formation of elliptical galaxies triggered by the mergers of galaxies whose orbits have decayed due to dynamical friction within the dark matter halo of a galaxy group or cluster.By combining this with a stellar population synthesis model and modelling dust extinction we were able to directly confront the model with a wealth of observational data. GALFORM is still widely used today.

My involvement in the "2-degree Galaxy Redshift Survey," the 2dFGRS, began when I joined a breakout meeting during a lunch break at the 1994 National Astronomy Meeting in Edinburgh. The meeting included Richard Ellis, John Peacock, George Efstathiou, Carlos Frenk and fellow former students of George, Will Sutherland and Steve Maddox whom I knew well from our Cambridge and Oxford days. This group soon grew into the 30 strong Anglo-Australian collaboration led by John Peacock and Matthew Colless which designed and implemented the 2dF galaxy redshift survey.

There were two key factors which enabled the 2dFGRS team to perform such a boundary pushing innovative survey. The first was the capabilities of the 2dF spectrographic instrument which was designed and built by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. This unique facility, opened in 1995, used 400 robotically positioned optical fibres to be enable 400 galaxy spectra to be measured simultaneously over the expanded 2 degree diameter field of view of the AAT. The second factor was the "APM galaxy catalogue," produced by Steve Maddox, George Efstathiou, Will Sutherland and Jon Loveday by carefully analysing and calibrating digitized photographic images from the UK Schmidt Survey. This provided the large scale homogeneous galaxy catalogue which were the targets for the 2dF instrument. Together these innovations enabled the 2dFGRS team to design and execute a program to measure 220,000 galaxy redshifts between 1995 and 2002. The resulting 3-dimensional map of the large scale galaxy distribution was 10 times larger than pre-existing surveys -- though it was soon to be overhauled by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The 2dFGRS team was a wonderfully productive collaboration. Innovative analysis led by a wide range of team members led to a stream of important results that pushed the study of galaxy populations and the large scale structure they trace out to a new level. The 2005 paper I led on large scale clustering in the final 2dFGRS dataset in which we detected the characterstic signature of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations was one of final 2dFGRS team papers. In recognition of the many 2dFGRS results the 2dFGRS team received the first ever ``group award for outstanding achievement by a large consortium'' from the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2005 I was promoted to Professor.

Throughout my time at Durham I have enjoyed the mentorship of my colleague Carlos Frenk. Together we have worked on numerous projects and jointly supervised many excellent PhD students. When I started in Durham the theory group lead by Carlos consisted of just two students and two postdocs. I have had the pleasure of seeing the steady growth of the group which came of age with the founding of the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC), housed in the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics in 2002. Currently I am the Deputy Director of the ICC. The institute has continued to expand and has now outgrown the original Ogden building. I am now looking forward to the group moving into an iconic new building designed by the internationally renowned architect Daniel Libeskind. His previous projects include the the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Center in Hong Kong Work on the new Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics, which has been partially funded by the Ogden Trust and Wolfson Foundation should start later this year and be complete by late 2016.