About Me

About Me

Short biography

Prof. Raúl Jiménez (Madrid, 1967) obtained his PhD at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen in 1995; he then moved to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh were he held a PPARC Advanced Fellowship. After a five year period, he went to the US where he became member of the faculty of the Physics & Astronomy department of Rutgers University and, later, the University of Pennsylvania. He joined ICREA in Sept 2007 as Professor at the ICC at the University of Barcelona and was appointed senior research fellow at Princeton University from 2007 to 2009. He was a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard in 2015-2016.

Research interests

I am a theoretical physicist interested in a number of problems in cosmology and astrophysics. My research ranges from the physics of the early universe to the physics of stars. The main drive of my research is to connect ideas in theoretical physics to observable phenomena and in turn explain new observations. The main objective of my research is to understand the fundamental laws of nature using cosmological and astronomical observations. My main topics of research change from time to time to adjust to advances in the field and include: cosmological parameters, the age of the universe, stellar evolution, stellar populations, high-redshift galaxies, dark energy, the early universe, large scale structure, the cosmic microwave background, galaxy formation and evolution, star formation, and the inter- stellar medium. I am especially interested in analysing large datasets and in the development of rigorous statistical algorithms. In the past years I have focussed on developing methods and techniques that are independent of the assumptions of the cosmology model to explore the fundamental laws of nature. I have also developed new models to explain the origin and evolution of the Universe that have the feature of having no free parameters and are based on quantum gravity and information theory. I am very active in science and public policy and recently I have written extensively on the role that Bayesian statistics, large data, machine and deep learning and robotization can have on our societies.

Among my main contributions to our understanding of the Universe are: the first evidence of dark energy from the ages of high redshift galaxies and globular clusters, the origin of dark galaxies, the first clue of how galaxies are assembled as a function of time, the first determination of the expansion history of the Universe, the role of cosmic explosions in the survival of exo-life, the role of symmetries in the universe, a lower bound to the cosmological constant, an accurate and precise age of the universe, the development of theoretical tools to model analytically the large scale structure, the first strong evidence for the hierarchy of neutrinos and a new model of the universe based on quantum information theory and gravity.

Keywords

Cosmology; Astrophysics; Statistics; Inference

ORCID

0000-0002-3370-3103