The former researcher of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB-IEEC), José Luís Bernal, received yesterday the XXV 2021 Doctoral Senate of the University of Barcelona Second Prize for his doctoral thesis "Cosmology on the Edge of the Λ-Cold Dark Matter”.

This award aims to distinguish the theses defended at the University of Barcelona that make relevant contributions to human knowledge and foster scientific progress.

Supervised by the ICCUB’s cosmologist Licia Verde, Dr Bernal defended his thesis at the University of Barcelona in 2019 and since then, he has obtained the recognition of the XVI Prize for the Spanish Doctoral Thesis in Astronomy and Astrophysics by the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA) as well.

At the moment, he is doing a postdoctoral stay in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU,Baltimore, United States) where he continues his work on the use of different approaches to understand the nature of the early Universe, the dark matter and dark energy. These problems are approached both from a theoretical point of view and by analysing observational data with new statistical techniques. In addition to his work on stress in determining the Hubble constant, he is also interested in large-scale observations of the Universe, mapped using line intensities, and in galaxy surveys.