Mateos, David

Biography

He was born in 1974 in Barcelona. He obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Barcelona in 2000. After that he enjoyed many years of wonderful postdoctoral life at Cambridge University, UK (2 years), Perimeter Institute, Canada (3 years) and University of California at Santa Barbara, USA (3 years). He is an ICREA Research Professor at the Dep. of Fundamental Phys. at the University of Barcelona since July 2008. In 2012 he was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (1.4 M€).

Research Interest

His main goal is to understand the physics of the Universe at the most fundamental level. Their present understanding is based on two theories. General relativity is a classical theory that provides a good description of gravitational interactions at large, macroscopic scales. The other three interactions, the electromagnetic, the strong and the weak interactions, are unified in a quantum theory, the so-called Standard Model of elementary particles. The answers to many important questions in fundamental physics require a unified, quantum theory of all interactions; these questions include the quantum properties of black holes, cosmology and the origin of the Universe, particle physics beyond the Standard Model, etc. For this reason he works on string theory, a quantum theory that has the potential to describe all forces and particles in Nature in a single, unified framework.