Frédéric Courbin obtained his PhD between ESO-Garching and the University of Liège in Belgium, both on strong gravitational lensing and image deconvolution. He then went to Chile for a postdoctoral fellowship at PUC and obtained a Marie Curie fellowship in Liège before taking up a senior scientist position at EPFL, where he was professor before joining ICCUB. Prof Courbin has also contributed to digital education, with MOOCs on astrophysics that attracted over 60’000 students of the years. He earned an ERC Advanced grant in 2018 (COSMICLENS) while at EPFL and then an ERC synergy grant (RedH0T) in 2025 together with Licia Verde.
Research interests
I work mostly in observational cosmology with gravitational lensing in all regimes: strong, weak and micro, addressing the problems of Dark Matter, Dark Energy and primordial black holes as well as the study galaxy formation and evolution, quasar inner structure, quasar/galaxy co-evolution. A strong component of my research also resides in pure signal/image processing, with expertise in ill-posed inverse problems, often central to interpret astrophysical observations. I am a regular user of HST, JWST, and most world-class telescopes. In 2022, I was nominated Swiss representative on the ESO Scientific and Technical Committee.
My main achievement has been to transform the field of time delay cosmography from a niche topic to a competitive cosmological probe to address the Hubble tension, one of the most important challenges in modern cosmology. This was acknowledged by my COSMICLENS ERC AdG in 2018. This work also led to the RedH0T ERC Synergy project, of which I am a CoPI.
Selected publications
- Akhaury U, Jablonka P, Courbin F & Starck JL 2025, 'Joint multiband deconvolution for Euclid and Vera C. Rubin images', Astronomy & astrophysics, 697 - A136.
- Dux, F et al. 2025, 'TDCOSMO XVII. New time delays in 22 lensed quasars from optical monitoring with the ESO-VST 2.6m and MPG 2.2m telescopes', Astronomy & astrophysics, 697 - A139.
- Barroso, JAA et al. 2025, 'Euclid: The Early Release Observations Lens Search Experiment', Astronomy & astrophysics, 697 - A14.
- Tomasetti E, Moresco M, Lardo C, Courbin F, Jimenez R, Verde L, Millon M & Cimatti A 2025, 'Time to Sparkler: Accurate ages of lensed globular clusters at z=1.4 with JWST photometry', Astronomy & astrophysics, 699 -A240.
- Birrer, S et al. 2025, 'TDCOSMO 2025: Cosmological constraints from strong lensing time delays', Astronomy & astrophysics, 704 - A63.