Marina Cortês has more than 15 years experience in cosmology. She worked in three continents, including National Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, the Perimeter Institute in Canada, and the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh in the UK, before taking up her current position at the Institute for Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Lisbon, Portugal. She has worked both in large observational collaborations such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and from a purely theoretical perspective.

Her work has influenced our understanding of the Universe’s youngest stages, the mystery of its present acceleration, and especially the fundamental nature of time itself. Her 2013 Physical Review Letters article `Anomalies in an Open Universe’ was selected as Special Highlight by the American Physical Society, an honour given only to less than 1% of all publications in this already exclusive journal.

In 2015 her article `The Universe as a Process of Unique Events’ was awarded the USD 10,000 Inaugural Buchalter Cosmology Prize, jointly with Lee Smolin. The jury described their work as a remarkable attempt to insert the flow of time back into the foundations of physics. Cortês' work in physics asks: ``Why does time always move forward and never backward?''

Her 6 year old son Dawa- named after the sherpa - puts this question perfectly: ``Time does not go where it wants'' Dawa said.