My name is Andreu Font-Ribera and I am a staff scientitst at the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE), in my hometown of Barcelona.
For years my website said that it was under construction, with the hope that one day it would be amazing, but now I accept that it will most likely stay like this for a while. However, you can check out the much cooler website of my ERC-funded group CosmoLya!
Brief CV
Before moving to IFAE, I was:
- a PhD student at the Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai (Barcelona, 2007-2011)
- a postdoc at the University of Zurich (Zurich, 2011-2013)
- a postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, 2013-2016)
- a lecturer at University College London (London 2016-2020)
From 2016 to 2020 I was supported by a STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship (grant reference ST/N003853/1) and since 2020 I am supported by a Ramon y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2018-025210) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Recently, I have been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project COSMO-LYA, where I plan to use a large dataset of distant quasars to study some of the mysteries of our Universe: dark energy, inflation, and the mass of neutrinos.
Research Interests
Most of my research interests are in the area of observational cosmology. I am particularly interested in the analysis of large spectroscopic datasets to study the large-scale structure of the Universe. In short, I construct 3D maps of the distribution of mass as a function of time, and I use these maps to understand better the evolution of the Universe.
During the last ten years I have been heavily involved in the cosmological analysis of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) collaboration, and of its successor eBOSS. I was one of the main authors of the DR16 BAO results using the Lyman alpha forest dataset, presented in du Mas des Bourboux et al. (2020), and of the final cosmological analysis from SDSS, presented in eBOSS Collaboration et al. (2021).
Our measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) at high redshift provide very accurate constraints on the expansion history of the Universe. You can find a press release from 2014 here, and outreach article here (in English) and a more recent outreach article here (in Spanish, published in Investigación y Ciencia).
I am now co-leading the BAO analysis from the Lyman alpha forest dataset of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Since May 2021, DESI is trying to solve the mistery of Dark Energy, while measuring the mass of the neutrinos, the lightest particles that exist.
Publications
You can find an exhaustive list of my publications on arXiv.