Ortwin Gerhard

Stay at the IAC: 15/09/2014 to 25/09/2014.

Research line: Galactic Formation and Evolution

Prof. Gerhard will give a Severo Ochoa seminar at the IAC on September 23th 2014, entitled The New Milky Way Bar and Peanut Bulge.

Dr. Ortwin Gerhard is Research Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (Garching, Germany)

Prof. Dr. Ortwin Gerhard received his doctoral degree (PhD) from the University of Cambridge, England (1982), with a thesis on interactions and mergers of spiral galaxies. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oxford (1982-83), at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Astrophysik in Garching (1983-86) and at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge (1986-88), working on the stellardynamics of galaxies. He then became a Heisenberg fellow at the Landessternwarte Heidelberg, leading a research group modelling the dynamics of galaxies. In 1994 he moved to the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he was Professor for Astronomy and later Director of the Astronomical Institute of the University. He moved to MPE in 2005.

His research interests include stellar dynamics, the structure of galaxies and galactic nuclei, the Milky Way galaxy, dark matter and intracluster stars. The focus of his work is theoretical with a strong interest in modelling observations.

During his visit to IAC he will continue the collaboration with Dr. Alfonso Aguerri and Dr. Inma Martinez-Valpuesta in the study of the galactic evolution in clusters, but will also look forward to discuss with other people in the Galactic Formation and Evolution group.