Julian Muñoz

Dr. Muñoz is a theoretical cosmologist, working as an Assistant Professor at the UT Austin Department of Astronomy. Before that, he was a Clay fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Physics Department. He got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 2017, and his Bachelor's from Madrid in 2013. 

Julian Muñoz's research is on the elusive dark matter and its connection to the first galaxies. He works at the intersection of astrophysics and particle physics. Recently, he has been focused on extracting cosmology, galaxy formation, and dark-matter microphysics from data at cosmic dawn, when the first stars formed in our universe. This includes using the powerful James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes, as well as the 21-cm line of hydrogen, where he's part of the HERA experiment. He has developed tools to use 21-cm both as a new dark-matter probe and as a standard ruler (using velocity-induced acoustic oscillations, or VAOs). Dr. Muñoz's interests also include gravitational lensing, the large-scale structure, light relics, primordial black holes, fast radio bursts, and the cosmic microwave background.