On Friday, September 5, 2025, we hosted the Inauguration of the Center of Gravity with a festive afternoon and evening. The historic Auditorium A at Blegdamsvej was filled to the brink with 67 registered participants, counting both center members and prestigious guests, who all enjoyed an afternoon understanding what journey the Center of Gravity is about to embark on.

We had the great pleasure of welcoming the DNRF Director Niels Mejlgaard, DNRF Chairperson of the Board and NBI Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Rector at the University of Copenhagen David Dreyer Lassen, the Dean of Science Bo Jellesmark Thorsen, our Head of Department Joachim Mathiesen, the Dutch Ambassador Nienke Trooster and the Portuguese Ambassador João Maria Cabral as well as a number of visitors and close colleagues to this event.

Joachim Mathiesen opened the ceremony congratulating the immense intellectual activity and community that Vitor brought to NBI. “The Center of Gravity will be a focus point of groundbreaking research in gravitational physics, but also of a new vibrant community of early career researchers and new leaders,” said Dorthe Dahl-Jensen in her opening speech.

The event was chaired by the Chairman of the CoG Advisory Board and NBI Professor Poul Henrik Damgaard, and we were fortunate to be able to welcome two other advisory board members to the Inauguration: Katy Clough, STFC Ernest Rutherford Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London and Scott Hughes, Prof. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Center Director Prof. Vitor Cardoso gave a presentation of the science he foresees the center will undertake in the coming years. "We want to be proud followers of Oersted and Bohr", said Prof Vitor Cardoso. “The Center of Gravity has all the potential and human capacity to change the physics landscape through a revolutionary discovery.” The Rector David Dreyer Lassen, closed the ceremony, highlighting the role that scientists and the free flow of scientific ideas have in safekeeping a free, democratic and healthy society.

The Dutch Ambassador Nienke Trooster stressed the timeliness of research on gravitational-wave physics, and the potential for discovery that it yields, in light of the amazing new detectors being planned, such as LISA and Einstein Telescope.

The reception was served in the new CoG lounge and we finished the evening in the beautiful setting of Restaurant Orangeriet in Kongens have, where all the invited participants took part in a delicious dinner. A selection of photos of the event can be found here.

About the Center of Gravity
The Center of Gravity tries to understand the gravitational interaction and the cosmos. The CoG is a Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) and aims to become the European hub for new ideas about the foundations of physics and especially about gravitational research.

The CoG Center currently consists of 52 people: 1 Center director, 5 board members, 5 Group Leaders, 3 Assistant Professors, 15 postdocs, 12 PhD students, 6 Master students, 2 CoG Fellows, 1 Research assistant, 1 Coordinator and 2 student assistants.

The CoG Advisory Board consist of 5 external members:
Katy Clough (Queen Mary University London)
Poul Henrik Damgaard (Chair, NBI)
Reinhard Genzel (Garching)
Scott Hughes (M.I.T.)
Aaron Zimmerman (University Texas Austin)