Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Ph.D.

Francisco (Paco) Villaescusa-Navarro is a computational cosmologist and AI researcher whose work aims to transform how scientific discovery is conducted. He has co-led the creation of major cosmological simulation suites—Quijote, CAMELS, DREAMS, and Backlight—that provide the community with petabytes of high-dimensional datasets for precision cosmology and machine learning.

His research develops new theoretical and AI-driven methods to optimally extract information from cosmological data, leveraging simulations to train machine learning models capable of performing fast, accurate inference in highly nonlinear regimes. His work bridges physics-based modeling and data-driven approaches, enabling new ways to analyze large-scale structure, galaxy formation, and survey data.

He is now developing frameworks to integrate multi-agent AI systems into the scientific workflow. As co-creator of Denario, an autonomous AI research companion, he is exploring how agents can generate hypotheses, evaluate literature, design experiments, write and execute code, and assist in scientific writing—reshaping the research process itself.

He earned a Ph.D. from the Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular in Valencia, Spain.