Hector Afonso Cruz, A.B.

Hector Afonso Cruz will join the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University as a postdoctoral fellow with Professors Yacine Ali-Haïmoud and Anthony Pullen. Hector is currently completing his Ph.D. in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University under Professor Marc Kamionkowski, where he is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Previously, he received his bachelor’s degree in Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University.

Cruz is a theoretical astrophysicist studying the earliest galaxies and their cosmological initial conditions. Recently, he has gravitated towards the epochs of cosmic dawn, when the first stars formed, and reionization, when stars heat and ionize their neutral surroundings. By constructing novel analytical tools, Hector seeks to probe the fundamentals of different luminous populations, the nature of early structure formation in the universe, and departures from concordance-model physics. At NYU, Cruz plans to develop these tools for future data sets to extract the secrets of cosmic expansion and geometry and elucidate the mysterious connection between galaxy evolution and the dark matter haloes they inhabit.