Debra M. Elmegreen
Stay at the IAC: 25/10/2014 to 16/11/2014
Research line: Formation and Evolution of Galaxies
Prof. Elmegreen gave a Severo Ochoa-Fundación Jesús Serra seminar at the IAC on November 1st 2014, entitled Transitions from Clumpy to Smooth Galaxies over Cosmic Time
Debra M. Elmegreen is Professor of Astronomy on the Maria Mitchell Chair at the Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York (U.S.A.).
Prof. Elmegreen got her doctoral degree (PhD) in Astronomy from the Harvard University in 1979. She was a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow at the (formerly named) Hale Observatories in Pasadena from 1979 to 1981, and then an IBM visiting scientist until 1988. She has been a member of the faculty at Vassar College since 1985. Debra Elmegreen is past president of the American Astronomical Society, the major organization of professional astronomers in North America. She served as President from June 2010-June 2012.
Her research interests include structure, interactions, and star formation in galaxies in the local universe and at high redshift. She observes in optical, near-infrared, and radio wavelengths.
Both Debra and Bruce Elmegreen are world-wide references in the field of galaxy formation and evolution. Between them they have published about 700 scientific articles that are cited about 1300 times per year. Among their outstanding contributions are the first morphological classifications of early galaxies, and the mechanism by which it is believed that galaxies form their bulbs.
Debra and Bruce Elmegreen maintain a regular collaboration with several research groups at the IAC. Their stay in this center has served to strengthen the existing bonds and has allowed a new generation of students and postdocs to relate directly with them. In particular, one of the objectives of their visit is to work with Johan Knapen and collaborators in the structure and evolution of nearby galaxies, in the fossil remains of the formation of their discs, and in how massive stars are produced within the spiral arms.
During their visit to the IAC, prof. Elmegreen also collaborated with Casiana Muñoz-Tuñón, Jorge Sánchez Almeida and the rest of their group in studies of galaxy formation fueled by gas filaments that come directly from the cosmic web. This collaboration seeks observational evidence that the accretion of pristine gas is responsible for the growth of galaxies, such as the cosmological models predict.
