Postdoctoral Fellows

Julia de León Cruz Exoplanets and Solar System

01/09/2016 - 31/12/2019
I obtained my PhD at the ULL in 2009 with a study of the compositional characterization of near-Earth asteroids. I have an extensive experience in the acquisition of spectroscopic data from both ground-based and space telescopes, as well as in the analysis of such spectra and their comparison with the spectra of meteorites obtained in the laboratory. I have published more than 40 scientific papers in peer reviewed international journals and more than 80 contributions to national and international meetings. I have specialized in the identification of different minerals and compounds in the surface of asteroids and I am currently focused in my participation as a member of the science team of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission. This mission is currently on their way to encounter asteroid Bennu, where it will collect material form its surface and bring it back to Earth for its analysis. My commitments within the Image Processing Working Group of this mission include the obtention of the color maps of the surface of the asteroid and the selection of the region to collect the sample of material. 

Francisco Shu Kitaura Joyanes Cosmology and Astroparticles

01/11/2016 - 15/05/2017 
F.-S. Kitaura obtained degrees in Physics with specialisations in Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, UCM (2002) and at the Technische Universität München (TUM) (2003), respectively. In mid 2004 he received an IMPRS fellowship and focused his research to study the cosmological large-scale structure (LSS) from galaxy surveys with statistical Data Analysis/Data Mining/Big Data tools. His PhD thesis “Cosmic Cartography: Bayesian Reconstruction of the Cosmological Large-Scale Structure” under the supervision of Prof. S. White (December 20 2007) was rated Magna Cum Laude by the Ludwig Maximilians University(LMU) commission. In 2008 he was granted a Marie-Curie fellowship from the EU to further develop his techniques to study the LSS from the Lyman-alpha forest with Prof. A. Ferrara at Scuola International Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) (Trieste) and at the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS). He then got several grants in the period end of 2010 till mid 2011 from The Cluster of Excellence and the Max-Planck Society in Munich. In mid 2011 he was awarded with the Karl-Schwarzschild fellowship to work at the AIP in Potsdam. He has more than 70 publications, about 1/4 of them as 1st author, almost 1/2 of them including 2nd author contributions, and gathering more than 3000 citations (h-index: 30, m-index: 3).

 Mª Jesús Martínez González Solar Physics

01/01/2017 - 31/12/2019
I obtained my PhD at the ULL in 2006. Then I moved to the Obs. de Paris-Meudon as a postdoctoral researcher, coming back to the IAC in 2009, and finally becoming a SO fellow in 2013. My research focuses on the study of the quiet solar magnetism by means of spectropolarimetry, although recently this interest has extended to spectropolarimetry in stars and AGN. Currently I'm in the scientific working group of the MIRADAS-GTC instrument and in the Board of Directors of the Sociedad Española de Astronomia. 

 Sergio Simón Díaz Stellar and Interstellar Physics

01/01/2016 - 31/12/2017
I obtained my PhD at the ULL in 2005. Then I worked at the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon as a researcher, moving again to the Observatoire de Geneve in 2007. I came back to the IAC in 2008 and finally became a SO fellow in 2013. My research is centred in the study of the physical properties of massive stars in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, also establishing synergies with the study of HII regions and stellar oscillations. I'm currently leading the IACOB project and member of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula survey collaboration.

 Claudio Dalla Vecchia Formation and Evolution of Galaxies

01/01/2016 - 31/12/2016
In 2005 I obtained my PhD at the Institute for Computational Cosmology (Univ. of Durham, UK). Then, I moved to Leiden Observatory and later on, in 2009, to the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Garching). In 2013 I joined the IAC. I am the leader of the newly established numerical/theory group whose main interest is galaxy formation, evolution and dynamics, and the link between observations and simulations. My personal interests are stellar feedback processes, the early universe galaxy evolution and the study of the internal structure of galaxies.

Jorge García Rojas Stellar and Interstellar Physics

01/01/2017 - 31/12/2019
I obtained my PhD at the ULL in 2006. Then I moved to Mexico as a postdoc researcher and came back to the IAC in 2009 as support astronomer until 2014, when I moved to a Severo Ochoa postdoc. I obtain the advanced Severo Ochoa position in 2016. My main research interest is the determination of heavy-element chemical abundances in the ionized interstellar medium. I am currently working on precise abundance determinations using weak emission lines in planetary nebulae, both in our galaxy and in nearby galaxies, and in the implications of these abundances determinations for low and intermediate mass star nucleosynthesis models and in chemical evolution models of galaxies. Within this line of research I am particularly interested in studying the influence of the binary evolution on the observed properties in planetary nebulae.

Michael Beasley Formation and Evolution of Galaxies

01/01/202017 - 31/12/2019
I obtained my PhD from Durham University, UK, in 2001. I then moved to Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia under a Royal Society research fellowship. In 2005 I moved to the University of California at Santa Cruz and then completed a generic postdoc at the IAC in 2009. At the IAC I am the leader of the TRACES group whose interests are the formation, evolution, stellar populations and dynamics  of galaxies.
My research interests include extragalactic globular cluster system and low surface brightness systems.

 Lee Patrick Stellar and Interstellar Physics

15/11/2016 - 14/11/2019
I obtained my PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2016 where I worked on estimating the chemical abundances of Red Supergiant Stars (RSGs) in external galaxies. Projects I am currently working on include, estimating the binary fraction of RSGs in external galaxies and probing the most massive stars in the central regions of the Milky Way. As the EMIR postdoc, I work with various EMIR data sets and observing tools.

Grzegorz Nowak Exoplanets and Solar System

16/12/2016 - 15/12/2019
I obtained my PhD in 2013 in Astronomy from the Nicolaus Copernicus Univeristy in Toruń, Poland. In September 2013 I joined IAC as a postdoctoral researcher, finally becoming a Severo Ochoa fellow in December 2016. My main research focus is on the transiting extrasolar planets and their atmospheres. The main research project I have worked since September 2014 is on-going KESPRINT collaboration to detect and quickly characterize interesting planetary systems discovered using the K2 public data from the new fields of view of the Kepler space telescope. I also participate in the GTC exoplanet transit spectroscopy survey for atmospheric characterisation of puffy hot jupiters and Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Échelle Spectrographs (CARMENES).

Josefa Becerra González Cosmology and Astroparticles

01/11/2017 - 31/12/2019
My main research topic is focused on the most energetic AGNs through the study of their emission in gamma rays, with special focus on the so called very high energy gamma rays (reaching energies above 100 GeV). This extreme energy window to the Universe was opened only very recently, and only of the order of 70 AGNs are known to emit in this energy range. Moreover, such extremely powerful AGNs are high variable across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. These two facts means that I spend a large fraction of my time as a gamma-ray hunter, discovering new gamma-ray emitters and catching new AGN flares which allow us to study extreme physics environments. I obtained my PhD from ULL in 2011 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Hamburg/DESY, ETH Zurich and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I am currently part of the international high energy collaborations MAGIC, CTA, Fermi-LAT and HAWC. 

Thomas Masseron Stellar and Interstellar Physics

01/01/2017 - 30/06/2019
I first started my research on stellar model atmosphere and high resolution stellar spectra of the first generation of stars between ESO and University of Montpellier (France) where I obtained my PhD in 2006. I moved to the Ohio State University (USA) to study stellar nucleosynthesis and chemical evolution of the early stages of the galaxy. I then extended then my skills to laboratory molecular spectroscopy applied to cool stellar spectra with the department of chemistry during my stay in Brussels. Finally, before arriving at IAC in2017 to work on giants and the APOGEE survey, I spent three years at the IoA (Cambridge, UK) using my spectroscopic skills to apply them on the Gaia-ESO large spectroscopic survey and notably coordinate a joint project between asteroseismology and spectroscopy. 

 Nicolas Crouzet Exoplanets and Solar System

01/01/2017 - 31/12/2019
My research focuses on instrumentation, observation and data analysis related to the search for and characterization of transiting exoplanets. This includes photometric observations with ASTEP (the Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets), and the XO project which searches for transiting exoplanets with several telescopes in the Northern hemisphere. I also characterize exoplanet atmospheres using spectroscopic observations obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, and I am now involved in the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.

 Jairo Méndez Abreu Formation and Evolution of Galaxies

01/01/2017 - 31/12/2019
I obtained my PhD from the ULL and University of Padua (Italy) in 2008. My main research topic has focused on building a comprehensive picture of the growth and evolution of the different stellar structures within a galaxy, i.e., bulges, bars, and disks. I am an expert in several key techniques to study galaxy evolution: galaxy photometry, coding his own 2D photometric decomposition algorithm; spectroscopic analysis with long-slit and IFS data, including the measurement of stellar and gas kinematics; analysis of large observational databases and individual galaxies. In general, I apply these techniques to the observational study of galaxies at low- and high-redshift to compare the in-situ and fossil approaches.

 Andrés Balaguera Antolínez Cosmology and Astroparticles

01/06/2017 - 31/12/2019
In 2011 I obtained my PhD at the University of Munich (LMU) and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE, Garching, Germany), where I worked on the cosmological analysis of X-ray cluster samples. I then moved for a Post-doc position to the Argelander Institute for Astronomy (Bonn, Germany, 2011-2013), after which I moved to the Astronomical Observatory of Frascati and the University of Roma3 (Rome, Italy, 2013-2016) where I developed codes for the cosmological analysis of the Euclid mission. I joined the IAC in June 2017. Some of my main scientific interest are galaxy clustering, galaxy properties in cosmological environments and the astrophysical content of information in the large scale structure of the Universe.

 Elodie Tiouchichine Cosmology and Astroparticles

01/07/2017 - 30/06/2019
I obtained my Phd in particle physics and astroparticles in 2014 at the Aix-Marseille University, in France. From 2011 to 2014 as member of the ATLAS Collaboration I studied the liquid argon calorimeter performance during the first data taken at the LHC. I also measured the electron reconstruction efficiencies and I contributed to one of the main analysis that led to the Higgs boson discovery announced in July 2012. During my first postdoc, from 2015 to 2017 in the Laboratorio de detección de partículas y radiación in Argentina I was a member of the DAMIC collaboration which uses the Charge Couple Devices in order to search for dark matter. I was involved in the calibration of the CCDs at low energy using X-rays sources and I developed an alternative method by using cosmic rays muons. Both methods showed really good agreement. Since July 2017, I joined the IAC and the AMS collaboration. The AMS is a particle detector operating onboard the International Space Station since 2011. Since then it has collected tenths of billions of charged cosmic rays allowing precision measurements of their composition and fluxes. My research interest in this context is the study of the heavy nuclei component of the cosmic rays.

 Tobías Felipe Solar Physics

01/09/2017 - 31/08/2019
I performed my PhD at Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), between 2006 and 2010, on wave propagation in the solar atmosphere using numerical and observational approaches. After finishing my PhD, I moved to Boulder (Colorado, USA) for a postdoctoral position at NorthWest Research Associates. In 2014 I was granted a "Juan de la Cierva" fellowship at Universidad de La Laguna, and since 2016 I have held two successive postdoctoral positions at the IAC, including this SO postdoc. My research interests cover a broad scope of solar physics topics, such as magnetohydrodynamic numerical simulations, wave propagation in the solar atmosphere, local helioseismology, and spectropolarimetric observations.

 Andrii Sukhorukov Solar Physics

03/10/2017 - 31/12/2019
I obtained my Ph.D. at the Main Astronomical Observatory (NAS of Ukraine) in 2013, where I studied the abundance of silicon and the formation of its solar spectrum. In 2014-2017 I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Solar Physics (Stockholm University), where I investigated how resonance spectral lines are formed in the chromosphere. From the fall of 2017, I'm an SO fellow in the IAC. In between the positions, I observed on and worked with observational data from several ground-based solar telescopes. I'm personally interested in applying numerical radiative transfer techniques to examine the structure, morphology, and dynamics of the solar atmosphere.

 Andrea Negri Formation and Evolution of Galaxies

01/08/2017 - 31/07/2019
During most of my academic career I studied early-type galaxies, to understand how they evolve, and what drives the co-evolution of their different components, mainly by means of numerical simulations. I obtained my PhD from the University of Bologna in 2014, where I investigated the evolution of the X-ray hot ISM and star formation in early type-galaxies, and their correlation with galaxy shape and kinematics. I moved to the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, where I expanded my research, studying AGN radiative and mechanical feedback effects on star formation in ellipticals. I joined the IAC as a Severo Ochoa postdoc in August 2017, where I work mainly with cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy clusters, studying how the environment affects galaxy evolution and their dynamics.

 Manuel Luna Solar Physics