Raúl Jiménez (Madrid, 1967) obtained his PhD at the Niels Bohr Institute in 1995, 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 of the Physics & Astronomy departments of Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania. He joined ICREA in Sept 2007. He was a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard in 2015-2016. Among his main 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, a lower bound to the cosmological constant and a new model of the universe based on quantum information theory and gravity.

Research interests

I am a theoretical physicist interested in cosmology and astrophysics. My research ranges from the physics of stars to the early universe. The main objective is to understand the fundamental laws of nature using cosmological and astronomical observations. Topics of research 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, and star formation. I am interested in analysing large datasets and the development of rigorous statistical algorithms. 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 am active in science and public policy and have written on the role that Bayesian statistics, large data, machine and deep learning and robotization can have on our societies.