Francisco-Shu Kitaura

Francisco-Shu Kitaura is the head of the cosmology large-scale structure group at the Institute for Astrophysics in the Canary Islands. He is the PI of the Big Data of the Cosmic Web project funded by the Spanish Government and co-PI of the Modified Gravity project funded by the Canarian Government. He leads the DESI cosmology group at the IAC and is also a member of EUCLID (2 years lead of the BAO reconstruction WP), JPAS (lead of the cosmic web science case), and 4MOST (2 years PI of the cosmology science case).
His scientific contributions started with hydrodynamical simulations with Boltzmann neutrino transport of the low mass end progenitor stars producing core-collapse Supernovae explosions. Then he moved to cosmology where he pioneered Bayesian dark matter inference methods and applied them to the Local Universe. He has also contributed to the understanding of galaxy bias, and the development of galaxy mock generation methods and led the production of the BOSS mocks for SDSS-III. He also led the first BAO detection from cosmic voids which are now being used to further improve BAO reconstruction.
He was International Max-Planck Research Fellow (2004-2007); Marie-Curie Fellow (2008-2010) at the Scuola Internazionale di Studi Avanzati in Trieste and at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; Karl-Schwarzschild Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics (2011-2016); visiting researcher at LBNL/UCB Berkeley (2016) and Ramón y Cajal tenure track Fellow at the ULL where he has the equivalent to an associate Professor position.
He has more than 100 peer-reviewed papers (including several Nature Astronomy and Physical Review Letters) integrating more than 14,000 citations (more than 10% of them as the first author).