France Allard
Stay at the IAC: 15/01/2015 to 15/02/2015 
Research line: Stellar and Interstellar Physics
Prof. France Allard gave a Severo Ochoa-Jesús Serra Foundation seminar at the IAC on January 29th 2015, entitled “Very Low Mass Stars, Brown Dwarfs and Gas Giant Exoplanets”.
France Allard is currently Director of Research at the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon - École Normale Supérieure (CRAL-ENS, France), position she has held since 2008.
Prof. Allard obtained her Ph.D. in Astrophysics at the University of Heidelberg in 1990, with a study on the modeling of stellar atmospheres of M dwarfs. She was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montréal (UdeM, Canada), Professor at University of British Columbia (UBC, Canada), research associate at Wichita State University (WSU, USA), and research officer at CRAL-ENS between 1998 and 2008, prior to her current position.
Her main area of research focuses on the model atmospheres and synthetic spectra of very low-mass stars, brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets. Her work and that of her group has had significant implications in these fields, being of great help in: the discovery of brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets, the determination of the mass of brown dwarfs, and detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of extrasolar giant planets.
The main objective of her stay at the IAC is to collaborate with Nicolas Lodieu and the rest of the IAC brown dwarfs group in several projects:
- Derive the physical parameters (metallicity, temperature, gravity, mass) of M subdwarfs through the direct comparison of optical+near-infrared spectra of M subdwarfs obtained by the IAC group with the latest state-of-the-art evolutionary models (BT-Settl) developed by France Allard and her group.
- Add the metallicity component to the current classification of M dwarfs.
- Evaluate the changes in the spectral energy distributions of M dwarfs with temperature and metallicity.
