Stephane Courteau

Stay at the IAC: 17/11/2014 to 12/12/2014
Research line: Formation and Evolution of Galaxies

Prof. Stéphane Courteau will give a Severo Ochoa seminar at the IAC on November 25th 2014, entitled Puzzles in the Scaling Relations of Spiral Galaxies.  

Stéphane Courteau is a Full Professor and Graduate Chair in the Dept of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy at Queen's University (in Kingston, Ontario, Canada).

Prof. Dr. Stéphane Courteau received his doctoral degree (PhD) from the University of California at Santa Cruz (1992), with a thesis under the supervision of University Professor Sandra Faber on "Cosmic Velocity Fields within 6000 km/s". He was a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University (1992-93), the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, AZ (1993-96) and the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, BC (1996-99), working on the global dynamics and scaling relations of disk galaxies. He took on a faculty position as assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (2000-2004) before accepting a faculty position at Queen's University in 2004.

His research interests include the formation, evolution, structure, and distribution of galaxies, with specific emphasis on the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, stellar populations in external galaxies, galaxy dynamics, properties of field and cluster galaxies, distribution and interplay of visible and dark matter in the Universe, numerical simulations of galaxies, and testing cosmologically-motivated structure formation models. Central to his research efforts is the development of original tests to elucidate fundamental theoretical and/or empirical puzzles in extragalactic astronomy.

During his visit to the IAC, he will collaborate with Drs. Johan Knapen, Marc Balcells, Jesus Falcon-Barroso, Ignacio Trujillo, Alexandre Vazdekis, and others in the Stellar Populations and Galaxy Evolution groups.