Just over 95% of our universe comes in the shrouded form of dark energy and matter that we can neither explain nor directly detect. Together, these two dark entities play out an epic cosmic battle with the gravity of dark matter slowly pulling structures in the universe together, and dark energy fueling the universe’s accelerated expansion, making it ever harder for those structures to grow.

Catherine Heymans is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, director of the German Center for Cosmological Lensing at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, and a European Research Council fellow. She specializes in observing the dark side of our universe and co-leads the European Southern Observatory’s Kilo-Degree Survey, using deep sky observations to test whether we need to go beyond Einstein with our current theory of gravity. Catherine Heymans is passionate about making science accessible for everyone. Her online course “AstroTech” has attracted over 40,000 students worldwide, and she is a regular contributor to radio shows, art, music, and science festivals.

The Einstein Lectures Dahlem, hosted by Freie Universität Berlin since 2005 in partnership with several external institutions, are dedicated to the epochal work of Albert Einstein. Einstein was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics for almost two decades. Since 2017, this first-rate-interdisciplinary colloquium is hosted in cooperation with the Max Planck Society, the successor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. The lectures are held in Dahlem, a district in Berlin with a tradition of being a center of scientific research. They address a broad academic audience and cover various scientific disciplines influenced by Einstein’s thinking.