Gustavo Bruzual

Stay at the IAC: 18/03/19 to 14/04/19 

Research line: Formation and Evolution of Galaxies

Currently Dr. Bruzual is reseracher at the Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica (CryA) in the Morelia Campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and professor at the UNAM Graduate Program in Astrophysics.

Dr. Bruzual obtained his PhD degree in 1981 from the University of California in Berkeley, USA. His thesis versed on Spectral Evolution of Galaxies. Then after he joined the staff at Centro de Investigaciones de Astronomía (CIDA) in Mérida, Venezuela, where he served for more than 30 years, including 21 years as director of the center. In september 2011 Dr. Bruzual retired from CIDA.

His research is centered on evolutionary population synthesis and modeling the spectral evolution of galaxies. The main goal is to understand the stellar population producing the spectral energy distributions of distant and nearby galaxies at different epochs of their evolution. His work in collaboration with S. Charlot (IAP, France) has become a landmark in the field. Their three papers together have received over 6200 citations. The Bruzual and Charlot (2003) models have proven very useful in deriving the physical properties of galaxies of different types observed in large galaxy surveys like the SDSS, allowing to characterize galaxies at various redshifts as belonging to the red sequence or the blue cloud, and providing an estimate of the stellar mass and its growth rate,in these systems. Currently G. Bruzual is working on improving different aspects of stellar population synthesis, like the treatment of TP-AGB and WR stars in spectral evolution models.

During his visit to IAC, Dr. Bruzual collaborated with Dr. Almudena Prieto and other researchers on various topics related to galaxy evolution, and the interpretation of galaxy properties.