A conference about the evolution and future of cosmology opens the new series of ICCUB Colloquia

Over the last twenty days, cosmology has undergone a dramatic progress. Several independent observations allowed reaching a Big Bang model that, together with an initial inflation period, describes the evolution of our universe for the last 13.772 million years with a few parameters and in an accurate way. We can say cosmology has entered a new precision era.

Licia Verde (Venice, 1971), ICREA researcher at ICCUB (IEEC-UB), is one of the most highly cited authors in this field according to the list Highly Cited Researchers, created in 2025 by Thomson Reuters. She worked at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, and has been visiting lecturer at Harvard University, Imperial College London or CERN, among others. She has been awarded with the Gruber Prize of Cosmology 2012 and a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2009.  

Since the beginnings of her career, she made relevant contributions to the development of current cosmology throughout participation in some of the most important space cartography projects, such as NASAʼs Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP, 2001-2012), and the SDSS-III collaboration project Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, recently finished. The space probe WMAP measured the cosmic microwave background temperature with a non-precedents precision, which allowed defining the current standard model for cosmology. BOSS project defined the distribution in three dimensions of galaxies and quasars, measuring distances at a cosmological scale that cover half the history of the Universe since the Big Bang, and established the relation between these distances and the expansion of the Universe.  

About ICCUB Colloquia series
The ICCUB Colloquia series is a set of conferences about distinguished themes in the fields of cosmology, astrophysics, and particle and nuclear physics -given by internationally distinguished scientists. Over the academic year 2016-2017 several conferences are planned, with speakers such as Licia Verde (Institute of Cosmos Sciences, ICCUB, IEEC-UB), Lisa Randall (Harvard University), Romain Quidant (Institute of Photonic Sciences, ICFO) and Guillem Anglada-Escudé (Queen Mary University of London). These conferences, aimed at students and researchers of physics and related disciplines, will take place on one Thursday per month at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona, headquarters of ICCUB. Attendants will have the chance to talk to the speakers.