FRANCISCO SHU
KITAURA JOYANES
Perfil profesional
Francisco-Shu Kitaura (FSK) 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 CosmoWeb: Big Data of the Cosmic Web project funded by the Spanish Government and PI of the CosmicBrain 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), 4MOST (2 years PI of the cosmology science case) and PFS (Subaru, Japan).
His scientific contributions started with hydrodynamical simulations with Boltzmann neutrino transport of the low mass end progenitor stars producing the first successful core-collapse Supernovae explosion. FSK coded the stellar outer hydrogen atmosphere, the soliton detection to avoid artificial numerically-driven explosions, the nuclear burning network, the electron capture rates and performed the 1D and 2D simulations and posterior analysis. This work had a great impact confirming long standing theories and became a famous paper with FSK as the first author integrating more than 500 citations to date.
Then he moved to cosmology where he pioneered Bayesian dark matter inference methods and applied them to the Local Universe performing the first forward modeling cosmological large-scale structure reconstruction ever. These works had a great impact in the field of cosmology and have opened a new way to perform cosmological large-scale structure analysis (his 23 first and co- author papers on Bayesian inference of the cosmological large scale structure integrate more than 1200 citations to date). The constrained simulations performed with this approach led to studies of the environmental dependence of galaxies and their morphology with unprecedented accuracy, to understand the local flows and the CMB dipole, to mitigate the Hubble constant tension, and to the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect detection with Planck data. He developed or co-developed the ARGO, ARES, HADES, BARCODE, BIRTH and BRIDGE Bayesian inference methods.
He has also contributed to the understanding of galaxy bias and the development of galaxy and Lyman alpha forest mock generation methods and led the production of the BOSS mocks for SDSS-III used in the final cosmological analysis. He (co-)developed the PATCHY, EZMOCKS, BAM, HYDRO-BAM, HADRON and HICOBIAN mock generation methods with 31 papers (19 first or second author) integrating more than 1700 citations (~1000 as first or second author).
He also led the first BAO detection from cosmic voids, which are now being used to improve BAO reconstruction further (9 papers with more than 290 citations). He was International Max-Planck Research Fellow (2004-2007); Marie-Curie Fellow (2008-2010) at the Scuola Internazionale di Studi Avanzati in Trieste and 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 (2017) at the ULL where he has the equivalent to an associate Professor position since 2022.
He has more than 115 peer-reviewed papers (including several Nature Astronomy and Physical Review Letters) integrating more than 19,000 citations (about 10% of them as the first author), 6 first author papers with more than 100 citations. He has appeared in the Stanford list of the 2% of most influential researchers worldwide in each year since 2021. Since 2020 he is editor of the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan (PASJ). He started having teaching experience in 2009 and has in total more than 800 hours of teaching record having been evaluated as excellent (above 4 over 5 stars) lecturer in three different matters (Statistics (CCII:4,4), Complex Variables (MMIV:4,2), and Cosmology (AyC:4,4)).