Probing the quantum origin of spacetime

Dr Christian Byrnes was educated in the UK, from the Steiner School South Devon to Exeter College for A levels, then Cambridge to study maths including part III, and finally becoming a doctor at the ICG in Portsmouth. After this Dr Byrnes was restless and spent the next five years abroad, four of them in Germany, divided between Heidelberg and Bielefeld. His final year abroad was at CERN, the worlds largest and most powerful laboratory, although his research remained firmly above ground, with a view of Mont Blanc. From October 2012 until December 2019 Dr Byrnes was a Royal Society URF at Sussex University and he is still here, now as a Reader in Physics. Dr Byrnes' main research is into primordial black holes and the initial conditions of the universe, such as inflation and primordial non-Gaussianity.

Bernard Carr is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. His area of research is cosmology and astrophysics and includes such topics as the early universe, dark matter, black holes and the anthropic principle. For his PhD he studied the first second of the Universe, working under the supervision of Stephen Hawking at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology. He then held Fellowships at Trinity College and the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge before moving to Queen Mary College. He has also held Visiting Professorships at Kyoto University, Tokyo University, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. He is the author of around three hundred scientific papers, editor of the book Universe or Multiverse? and co-author of the book Quantum Black Holes.

Bruno Valeixo Bento is a final year PhD student at the University of Liverpool, where his research has focused on phenomenological aspects of warped compactifications of string theory, in particular on their gravitational and cosmological signatures (dark energy, inflation, gravitational waves). More broadly he is interested in the imprints left by UV physics on the low-energy EFTs (eg the swampland and positivity bounds programmes) and how these may help us connect string theory with current and future experiments. He is also interested in other approaches to quantum gravity, such as causal set theory. Bruno obtained his MSc degree from Imperial College London and will be joining IFT Madrid for his first postdoctoral position.  

Dr Suddhasattwa Brahma received his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University under the supervision of Professor Martin Bojowald. Since then, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Fudan University (Shanghai), at APCTP (South Korea) and at the McGill University (Montreal). Dr Brahma received the ‘International Exchange Postdoctoral Fellowship’ from China while at the Fudan University and the CITA National Fellowship while at the McGill University. Currently, he is a Higgs Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His research focusses on quantum aspects of gravity and its applications for early-universe cosmology and black hole physics.

João Magueijo was born in Portugal. He got a PhD in Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University in 1993, following which he became a Research Fellow at St John's College, specializing in Early Universe Cosmology. Since 1996 he has been at Imperial College, first as a Royal Society Fellow, then as staff, becoming a Full Professor in 2006. His work includes an attempt to build cosmology upon theories permitting the variation of the fundamental constants of nature, including the speed of light. More recently he has worked on quantum gravity theories, and how cosmology may be used as their 'test tube'. He has written two popular science books, a travelogue and a novel.

Dr Eleonora Di Valentino had her PhD in La Sapienza University of Rome, with a thesis about constraining fundamental physics with cosmological data. She then moved to the Institute d'Astrophysique de Paris, with a Lagrange fellowship, where she joined the team working on the likelihood for the Planck CMB satellite experiment. After that Dr Di Valentino accepted a postdoctoral position in Manchester, UK, to work in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration, followed by an Addison-Wheeler fellowship in Durham, UK, to work on cosmological tensions. She finally obtained her current position as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Irene Valenzuela obtained her PhD in theoretical physics at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 2015. Subsequently, she has held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Physics (Munich), Utrecht University, Cornell University and Harvard University. In 2021 she got a ‘Ramon y Cajal’ grant to start a tenure-track position at the Institute of Theoretical Physical UAM-CSIC in Madrid. Since 2022, she is also a scientific staff member at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). She has received the 2021 Award for Young investigator in theoretical physics funded by the Royal Spanish Society of Physics and an ERC Starting Grant in 2021. Her research focuses on quantum gravity (in particular, string theory) and its interplay with particle physics and cosmology. She is internationally recognized as a leading figure of the swampland program, which is a new way to connect string theory with our universe based on determining the universal constraints that quantum gravity imposes at low energies. She has pioneered several of the phenomenological implications of the swampland program as well as opened new avenues to rigorously test the swampland conjectures in string theory. Her work has unveiled many interesting connections between the swampland constraints and other research topics such as categorical symmetries, holography, black hole entropy bounds and algebraic geometry.