Name: Patricio Vielva
Current position: Faculty
Affiliation: Instituto de Física de Cantabria (CSIC - UC)
Field of research: Observational Cosmology
What is your career trajectory to date?
I obtained my PhD in 2003 at the University of Cantabria. After a period of postdoctoral research in Paris (at the College de France and the Laboratory d'Astroparticule et Cosmologie), at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Santander, I obtained a "Ramón y Cajal" tenured-track position at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in 2008. Since 2012 I have been a staff researcher at that center, belonging, first, to the University of Cantabria and, since 2017, to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
What are the most exciting open questions in your research area?
The three most relevant aspects I am working on are the detection of the B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background, which could provide evidence for the primordial gravitational wave background produced by the cosmic inflaton mechanism, and the nature of dark matter. The latter I address through the cosmic microwave background, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the direct detection of dark matter itself.