Today we have the pleasure of hosting Carsten van de Bruck, visiting us from Sheffield! Carsten is currently a Professor at the University of Sheffield, and is a recognized expert on theoretical cosmology, particularly for what concerns modified gravity models for inflation and dark energy, and their observational tests. He will not be delivering a talk, but is here as one of the external opponents for Chiara Cecchini’s PhD defense (which, by the way, was outstanding - you can find her PhD thesis on scale-invariant inflationary models here). Welcome Carsten!