Recent developments in string model-building and cosmology
  In this talk I discuss recent developments in moduli stabilisation, SUSY
breaking and chiral D-brane models together with several interesting features
of cosmological models built in the framework of type IIB string
compactifications. I show that a non-trivial pre-inflationary dynamics can give
rise to a power loss at large angular scales for which there have been mounting
observational hints from both WMAP and Planck. I then describe different
stringy embeddings of inflationary models which yield large or small tensor
modes. I finally argue that reheating is generically driven by the decay of the
lightest modulus which can produce, together with Standard Model particles,
also non-thermal dark matter and light hidden sector degrees of freedom that
behave as dark radiation.
