Debora Šijački is a computational cosmologist whose research involves computational methods for simulating the formation and development of the structures in the universe including galaxies, galaxy clusters, and dark matter,[1] including collaborations in the Illustris project.
[2] Originally from Serbia,[3] she was educated in Italy and Germany,[4] and works in the UK as a professor at the University of Cambridge[5] and deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology.
[4] Her dissertation, Non Gravitational Heating Mechanisms in Galaxy Clusters,[3] was jointly supervised by Volker Springel and Simon White.
After continued postdoctoral research from 2010 to 2012 in the US at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, she returned to the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy in 2013 as a university lecturer.
[4][7] She was the 2019 recipient of the Ada Lovelace Award for High Performance Computing of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), recognizing her "numerous high-impact results in astrophysics based on numerical simulations on state-of-the-art supercomputers".