Our People

Professor David Alonso

Dr David Alonso

Professor David Alonso

  • Carrie Perrodo Fellow and Tutor in Physics
  • Professor of Cosmology

David Alonso studied Physics and received a PhD in Theoretical Physics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Oxford, and as Tutor of Astrophysics at Christ Church, before moving to Cardiff University with an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship. He then returned to Oxford as Professor and Tutorial Fellow at St Peter's in 2019.

Research

David does research in cosmology, and is mostly interested in extracting information about fundamental physics from large astronomical datasets on different wavelengths. In this sense, the two most interesting regimes in the evolution of the Universe are the mysterious accelerated expansion at late times, fuelled by an unknown form of "Dark Energy", and the violent expansion of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, since it provides a unique window into physical process at very high energies. David is heavily involved in two international collaborations trying to study these two epochs.

On the one hand, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time will tackle the problem of Dark Energy by jointly studying the large-scale distribution of galaxies and the correlation in their shapes caused by the gravitational lensing effect. On the other hand, David is a member of the Simons Observatory, an experiment that aims to observe the subtle imprint left by the gravitational waves emitted after the Big Bang on the polarization of its afterglow light (the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background).