Jose María Ezquiaga is awarded Villum Young Investigator Grant

NBIA Assistant Professor Jose María Ezquiaga receives a prestigious Villum Young Investigator Grant to conduct the project “Exploring the Uncharted Universe with Gravitational Waves”.

This project will exploit the recently discovered gravitational waves – ripples in space and time produced by extreme gravitational systems like colliding black holes - to open unique opportunities for exploring the cosmos. In particular, Jose Maria Ezquiaga will use the upcoming new observations from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration to measure the Universe’s expansion rate in uncharted regions, map the matter distribution at galactic scales via gravitational lensing and test Einstein's gravity.

Jose María Ezquiaga obtained his PhD from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2019 and then moved to the University of Chicago as a NASA Einstein Fellow. Jose joined NBIA in October of 2022. The grant from the Villum Foundation will allow Jose to build a team of PhD students and postdocs working at the interface of gravitational waves, cosmology and fundamental physics.