David Bacon is a British cosmologist who is professor and director of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth.
Bacon first thought about becoming a scientist around the age of 13, inspired by enthusiastic teachers at school.
Gravitational lensing is the bending of light from distant sources by massive objects along the line of sight.
Measuring the average effect of lensing across many sources allows the structure of the matter in between to be determined.
During his PhD, Bacon was lead author on one of four independent papers that first detected cosmic shear.