I am visiting Kavli IPMU on leave from Caltech/ JPL in Pasadena, where I am a Senior Research Scientist since 2003, and where I am working in the ESA/NASA Planck mission collaboration. Most of my career was focused on studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. After I completed my education in Poland, I came to Berkeley to work with Joseph Silk, and Marc Davis on cosmology and large scale structure in the universe. Afterwards I joined the COBE team and NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center to work on the characterization of the pioneering measurements of the CMB anisotropy.

Since then I continued to develop the analysis and science extraction methods for CMB applications. Amongst those, the one that I originally created and that became very broadly used is HEALPix (http://healpix.sourceforge.net), a method for efficient discretization and analysis of data distributed on the sphere.

I took part in a wide array of science projects that were spawned by acquisition of the remarkable Planck data set, including (1) the studies of temperature and polarization of foreground emission and its separation, (2) assessments of statistics of the primordial CMB fluctuations, (3) and isotropy of the universe, (4) as well as estimation of the CMB anisotropy spectrum and its parametrization, which became a pinnacle of modern cosmology.

Now, that Planck project is nearing its completion, we are looking forward to new avenues for pushing ahead with CMB measurements. LiteBIRD satellite mission proposed to JAXA is one of such exciting prospects for delivering space based measurements of CMB polarization of sufficiently high fidelity to reveal the coveted background of primordial gravity waves leftover from the inflationary inception of our universe.

I am visiting Kavli IPMU to interact with the Japanese team of LiteBIRD to share our Planck experience with space exploration of the CMB, and to establish prospects for the future collaboration.