University of Cape Town, South Africa

Since August 2015, Álvaro (Aranjuez, 1980) has been a Permanent Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a full-time member of the UCT Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravity Centre (ACGC) at UCT. Previously, awarded a PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid (2010, Summa cum Laude) on theoretical and observational constraints in extended theories of gravity. Subsequently held a postdoctoral fellow post at the UCT Cosmology and Gravity group and obtained a Marie Curie postdoctoral contract at the ICE-IEEC Barcelona. Between 2014 and 2015, he was given a Profesor Ayudante Doctor (Assistant Lecturer) contract by the Theoretical Physics Department at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Álvaro’s publications include more than 50 peer-reviewed articles with seminal contributions in the areas of cosmological large-scale structures, foundations of theories beyond Einsteinian gravity and indirect methods of dark matter detections. Álvaro is also a scientific referee for twenty-two journals and several international scientific agencies and has been responsible for enabling several MSc and PhD students to graduate.

To date, Álvaro has been member of the scientific teams for seventeen research funded projects. Since 2016 he has been a member of two running EU-COST actions and along the course of his career he has been the Principal Investigator (PI) for six funded research projects in both Europe and South Africa.

In 2017 he was appointed as an Associate in the SKA Cosmology collaboration and was honoured with the Young Researcher Award, (UCT College of Fellows, 2017) and the Claude Leon Foundation Merit Award for Early-career Researchers (2018).