06. September 2024

ERC Starting Grant for Assistant Professor Andrina Nicola ERC Starting Grant for Assistant Professor Andrina Nicola

Dark Energy and Inflation

In her ERC Starting Grant project, “PiCo—Towards constraining the Pillars of our Cosmological model using combined probes”, Assistant Professor Andrina Nicola from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at the University of Bonn will be exploring two fundamental questions of modern physics: What mechanism gave rise to the primordial fluctuations seeding all the structures seen in the Universe today? And what is the cause of the Universe’s late-time accelerated expansion?

Assistant Professor Andrina Nicola receives an ERC Starting Grant.
Assistant Professor Andrina Nicola receives an ERC Starting Grant. © Barbara Frommann / Universität Bonn
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To answer these questions, she combines different cosmological probes such as galaxy clustering, weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clusters. Her research group will then apply their newly developed analysis methods to data from the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the Simons Observatory. “With our work, we aim to shed light on two fundamental pillars of our cosmological model, dark energy and inflation,” said Assistant Professor Andrina Nicola, who is also a member of the Matter Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) at the University of Bonn.

Andrina Nicola studied physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where she also obtained her PhD. She then worked as a postdoc at Princeton University in the US before moving to Washington University in St. Louis as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor. She has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Bonn’s Argelander Institute for Astronomy since May 2023.

Seven ERC Starting Grants for the University of Bonn

Further six researchers at the University of Bonn are being funded by the European Union with an ERC Starting Grant. More detailed information can be found in the University of Bonn's press release.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Andrina Nicola
Argelander-Institut für Astronomie
Universität Bonn
E-Mail: anicola@uni-bonn.de

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