Ramón y Cajal fellow, San Cristóbal de la Laguna

Postdoctorat a Espanya, 2018

My main interests are to reveal the properties of intriguing types of galaxies and the role they play into the big puzzle of galaxy formation and evolution, and ultimately, our place into the Universe. I obtained my PhD in Astrophysics at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (2013), studying how the most massive galaxies in the Universe form and evolve. They hold the majority of the luminous matter of the Universe, and thus are a key piece of the puzzle of the formation of the Universe. Then, I moved to the Big Island of Hawaii, working as postdoctoral researcher at the Subaru Telescope (2013-2016). During the 3 years there, I glimpsed how hard it is to make such big telescopes to work while digging further into the mysteries of massive galaxies. I then moved to Melbourne, Australia, as a postdoctoral researcher at Swinburne University (2016-2018), switching my interest onto the small, less massive galaxies, considered to be the primordial building blocks that created the big, massive ones at later times. Only by understanding how these ancient galaxies formed we can solve the mystery of the larger ones. However, there is an entire Universe that was being hidden at plain sight, full of small, very diffuse and dim galaxies that are now finally accessible with the latest technology developed in the large optical telescopes. In 2018 I was awarded a Junior Leader LC Fellowship at the Institut de Ciències del Cosmos UB, to illuminate this hidden Universe and its new types of galaxies. From September 2021 to the end of 2022 I have been a Severo Ochoa Advanced Fellow back to the IAC, further characterizing the life and death of these different types of galaxies and their relation with the supermassive black holes in their centers. From January 2023 I will hold a Ramón y Cajal fellowship in this same institute, the IAC.