Christopher Michael Hirata (born November 30, 1982) is a Japanese-American cosmologist and astrophysicist.
Hirata was 13 years old when he won the gold medal in 1996 at the International Physics Olympiad.
[2] He received his PhD under the supervision of Uroš Seljak in 2005 from Princeton University in Astrophysics (thesis: "Weak Gravitational Lensing Theory and Data Analysis").
Hirata's research emphasis is Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), Dark energy and accelerating expansion of the universe, galaxy clusters and the large-scale structure of the universe (and the formation of these structures, the Reionization epoch), and gravitational lenses as a tool of Cosmology.
[4] In 2010, with Dmitriy Tseliakhovich, he pointed to an unprecedented effect in cosmological perturbation theory for the calculation of the formation of the first structures in the universe.