Stephen is currently Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) and Founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (CTC) at the University of  Cambridge. For over thirty years he has lead the General Relativity group in DAMTP and he has been Principal Investigator of the COSMOS National Cosmology Supercomputer since 1997. Stephen is also the Emeritus Lucasian Professor for Cambridge, a prestigious title that boasts Isaac Newton, Paul Dirac and Charles Babbage amongst its previous holders. 

During his time at Cambridge Professor Hawking has written a large number of publications. The best way to read the most recent publications by Professor Hawking or his colleagues is by going to the SLAC SPIRES HEP site and searching for "Find author Hawking".

Stephen and I go back nearly forty years to when we we were both starting out at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy led by Fred Hoyle. We've been on the same wavelength ever since. The most important topic we worked on together is the no-boundary quantum state of the universe. Such a theory of the universe's quantum state is essential for understanding the extreme conditions of the big-bang. In many ways, the no-boundary state is the simplest state the universe could have had. That is consistent with the remarkable simplicity of the early universe revealed by observations of the cosmic background radiation - the light from the big bang. Today, more than 25 years after its proposal, the no-boundary state has successfully explained the origin of classical spacetime, the origin of the detailed structure of the universe seen in the distribution of galaxies, and the arrows of time of the universe. Stephen, Thomas Hertog, and I are continuing to work to see how far the no boundary quantum state can go in explaining our quantum universe.