Azadeh Maleknejad

Azadeh Maleknejad

Theoretical physicist. I study the earliest moments of the Universe: how quantum fields and gravity shaped it, and the traces they left in gravitational waves, dark matter and matter itself.

Senior Lecturer in Physics, Swansea University
Royal Society University Research Fellow
Centre for Quantum Fields and Gravity

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About

I’m a theoretical physicist working on cosmology, quantum field theory and gravitational waves. Much of my research asks how the quantum fields of the early Universe left lasting traces: in the imbalance between matter and antimatter, in dark matter, and in a background of gravitational waves that new detectors, including quantum sensors, may one day pick up.

I’m a Senior Lecturer at Swansea University, in the Centre for Quantum Fields and Gravity, and a Royal Society University Research Fellow. Before Swansea I held my fellowship at King’s College London, and I was a Theory Fellow at CERN and a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. From November 2025 to April 2026 I held the Beate Naroska Guest Professorship at DESY and Universität Hamburg.

Positions

  • 2025 – present

    Senior Lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow

    Centre for Quantum Fields and Gravity, Department of Physics, Swansea University, UK

  • 2025 – 2026

    Beate Naroska Guest Professor

    DESY and Universität Hamburg, Germany

  • 2023 – 2025

    Royal Society University Research Fellow

    Department of Physics, King’s College London, UK

  • 2020 – 2023

    CERN Theory Fellow

    Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, Switzerland

  • 2017 – 2020

    Postdoctoral researcher

    Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany

Honours and awards

  • 2023 – 2031

    Royal Society University Research Fellowship

  • 2024 – 2026

    Beate Naroska Award and Guest Professorship, DESY and the Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe

  • 2021

    Buchalter Cosmology Prize

  • 2017

    Recognition from The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS)

  • 2016

    Khwarizmi Young Scientist Award in Basic Sciences

Lectures & Interviews

Lectures and courses

  • Autumn 2026

    Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and the Quantum Frontier

    New postgraduate course I designed, Swansea University

  • Feb – Mar 2026

    Interacting Quantum Fields in de Sitter Space, three lectures

    DESY Workshop Seminar Series, DESY, Germany

    Read the lecture notes on arXiv

  • Jul 2025

    Gravitational Waves in Cosmology, four lectures

    Advanced MSc course in particle physics and theoretical cosmology, Max Planck Institutes, Munich

    Read When Geometry Radiates

  • May 2021

    Spinning Fields in Inflation

    International Physics Webinar Series

    Watch the lecture

  • Feb 2021

    Spinning Fields in Inflation and Their Remnants in the Sky

    Quantum Aspects of Space-Time and Matter seminar series

    Watch the lecture

Recorded talks

  • 2026

    The Stochastic Schwinger Effect

    GenHET Meeting on Beyond the Standard Model, CERN

    Watch

  • 2025

    Parity Violation in the Early Universe and Creation of Matter

    Parity Violation from Home Workshop

    Watch

  • 2024

    Weyl Fermion Creation by Cosmic Perturbations

    Looping in the Primordial Universe Workshop, CERN

    Watch

  • 2023

    Photon Chiral Memory Effect

    Gravitational Memory Effects Workshop, Queen Mary University of London

    Watch

  • 2021

    Is Our Universe the Remnant of Chiral Anomaly in Inflation?

    SITP Colloquium, Stanford University

    Watch

  • 2021

    Our Universe and Chiral Anomaly in Inflation

    Cambridge High Energy Workshop, Harvard and MIT

    Watch

Interviews, public talks and writing

  • 2026

    Press coverage of our paper on gravitational-wave induced freeze-in of fermionic dark matter

    ScienceDailyPhys.org

  • 2025

    Book review of Massimo Giovannini’s Relic Gravitons

    CERN Courier

    Read the review

  • 2023

    Gravitational waves: a golden era, feature article with Fabrizio Rompineve

    CERN Courier

    Read the article

  • 2021

    A Common Origin for Inflation, Massive ν, Baryogenesis and Dark Matter

    Interview for Cosmology Talks

    Watch the interview

Research & Publications

My research

I organize my research around three connected pillars:

  1. Quantum field theory in stochastic cosmic backgrounds
  2. Particle production, relics, and gauge dynamics (Abelian & non‑Abelian)
  3. Gravitational-wave generation, phenomenology, and detection
Diagram of three connected research pillars forming a triangle: Quantum Fields in Stochastic Universe, Phenomenology, and Observation and Gravitational Waves.

Publications

All my papers, grouped by topic. Choose a topic to see its papers. INSPIRE always has my most up-to-date record.

INSPIRE arXiv Google Scholar ORCID

QFT in cosmology

Quantum fields in de Sitter space and in stochastic cosmic backgrounds, and the particles they create.

Particle cosmology

Model building and phenomenology beyond the Standard Model: inflation driven by gauge fields, dark matter and dark energy, the origin of matter, and the signals these leave for observation.

Gravitational waves & quantum sensing

How gravitational waves are made, what they carry and how to detect them. I also propose new detector designs based on quantum sensing.

New detector designs and quantum sensing

Theory, cosmology and observation

Also: earlier work in soft-matter physics, Chain Deformation Helps Translocation, with F. Farahpour, F. Varnik and M. R. Ejtehadi, Soft Matter 9 (2013) 2750–2759.

Puzzles of the Early Universe

Some of the big open questions my research works on, explained without equations.

  • Why is there more matter than antimatter?

    The Big Bang should have made matter and antimatter in equal amounts, and the two destroy each other on contact. Yet almost everything we see is matter. Part of my work explores how quantum effects during inflation, involving gauge fields and gravitational waves, could have tipped the balance.

  • Where did dark matter come from?

    Most of the matter in the Universe is invisible to us. With Joachim Kopp, I studied how gravitational waves in the very early Universe could themselves have created dark matter particles.

  • What happened before the hot Big Bang?

    Many cosmologists think the Universe began with a brief burst of extremely fast expansion called inflation. My earliest work, and my PhD, looked at how gauge fields, the kind of fields that carry the forces of nature, could have driven or shaped that expansion.

  • Can we hear the beginning of time?

    Light can’t reach us from the very first moments, but gravitational waves can. Some of my recent work proposes ways to tell whether these waves twist more one way than the other, which would be a fingerprint of new physics.