Courbin, Frédéric
Professor
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
Short biography
Frédéric Courbin obtained his PhD between ESO-Garching and the University of Liège in Belgium, both on strong gravitational lensing and image deconvolution. He then went to Chile for a postdoctoral fellowship at PUC and obtained a Marie Curie fellowship in Liège before taking up a senior scientist position at EPFL, where he was professor before joining ICCUB. Prof Courbin has also contributed to digital education, with MOOCs on astrophysics that attracted over 60’000 students of the years.
Research interests
My research is in observational cosmology and in gravitational lensing in all regimes: strong, weak, micro and milli. I contributed to develop the field of time delay cosmography with strongly lensed quasars, to measure the Hubble constant and address the so-called Hubble tension between early and late Universe measurements. I was granted and ERC Advanced Grant in 2018, COSMICLENS, specifically on time delay cosmography.
I'm also a builder member of the ESA-NASA Euclid mission, in which I've been involved from the very beginning. In Euclid, I'm the current lead of the strong lensing science working group. I'm active in the Rubin-LSST time domain survey and is part of the Spanish-led ESA-ARRAKIHS mission to study the nature of Dark Matter with ultra-deep observations of local galaxies.
A significant part of my research is also in pure signal processing, and in particular image deconvolution and morpho-spectral decomposition with sparse regularization and machine learning techniques.