Prof. Raúl Jiménez (Madrid, 1967) obtained his PhD at the Niels Bohr Institute in 1995; he then moved to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh were he held a PPARC Advanced Fellowship. He then went to the US where he joined the faculty, as a professor, of the Physics & Astronomy departments of Rutgers University and, later, the University of Pennsylvania. He joined ICREA in Sept 2007 as Professor at the ICC. He was a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard in 2015-2016. He has made several contributions to our understanding of the Universe: 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 exolife, the role of symmetries in the universe and a lower bound to the cosmological constant.

Research interests

Prof. Raúl Jiménez is a theoretical physicist interested in a number of problems in astrophysics and cosmology. 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 os to understand the fundamental laws of nature using cosmological and astronomical observations. His fields of research include: the formation and evolution of galaxies, stellar evolution, the cosmic microwave background, dark energy and the origin of the universe.