mail: martinez(at)ifca.unican.es
Office: 102

Enrique Martínez González

Research Professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the founding head of the Observational Cosmology and Instrumentation group at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA, CSIC-UC)). He graduated in Physics from the University of Cantabria in 1982 and carried out his PhD studies at NORDITA (Copenhagen) between 1983 and 1986 under the supervision of Prof. Bernard J.T. Jones. He then obtained a postdoctoral contract from the Ministry of Education at the University of Cantabria 1986-1988, followed by an Assistant Professorship at the same university from 1988 to 1990. In 1990, he joined CSIC as a Research Scientist (Científico Titular), was promoted to Senior Research Scientist (Investigador Científico) in 2003, and to his current position of Research Professor in 2007. His research focuses in Cosmology, specifically the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the Large Scale Structure (LSS) of the Universe. His work includes the development of CMB instrumentation and experiments, as well as data analysis and theoretical implications. His scientific output exceeds 400 peer-reviewed publications, with over 90,000 citations.

He has participated in numerous high-impact experiments, notably the ESA Planck mission to measure the CMB anisotropies (whose team received the Gruber Cosmology Prize; the RAS Group Achievement Award for Astronomy; and the Marcel Grossman Institutional Award, all in 2018) where he contributed as Co-Investigator of the Planck-LFI instrument and Mission Scientist; he was responsable for delivering the back-end modules of the 30 and 44 GHz radiometers. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the QUIJOTE experiment installed at the Teide Observatory whose objective is the characterisation of the synchrotron radiation of our galaxy as well as the measurement of the CMB polarisation. Since 2018, he has served as a member of the Interim Governance Body and Spanish representative for the JAXA LiteBIRD mission to measure the polarisation of the CMB, with a launch expected for the first half of next decade. He also participates in the J-PAS project, a mapping of galaxies to measure Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations, contributing to the Inflation topic within the Science Working Group; as well as in the ESA Euclid mission whose main objective is the study of the nature of dark energy and the nature and distribution of dark matter in the universe; and in the CADEx experiment to search for dark matter, which will be installed in the Canfranc Underground Laboratory. More recently, he has joined the team of the ESA ARRAKIHS mission, led by IFCA; this mission, the first in ESA’s science programme to be led from Spain, aims to test the cold nature of dark matter in nearby galaxies.

He has been Principal Investigator of 5 international and more than 20 national projects, securing over 10M€ in research funding. It is worth mentioning the coordination of the first European Network of the CMB funded by the European Commission, the coordination of the excellence project “Exploring the Physics of Inflation” of the Consolider Ingenio-2010 programme, and the scientific direction of the IFCA-MDM excellence project 2018-22. He has supervised 12 doctoral theses and is currently supervising 3, and also a similar number of postdocs. In relation to institutional responsibilities, he has been director 2012-16 and vice-director 2008-11 of the IFCA, member of the Governing Council of the University of Cantabria 2012-13, director of the Physics and Mathematics area of the CCI Campus of Excellence since 2011-16, Institutional Delegate of the CSIC in Cantabria 2009-2019 and member of the Spanish National Astronomy Commission during 2023-25.


Research interests

Collaborations & Missions





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