I am a member of the faculty at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, since January 2021. My research focusses on studying the stellar populations and star-formation histories of nearby galaxies in order to understand how galaxies evolve and how their morphologies transform throughout their lives. My main approach towards this work is to model the different components within galaxies, such as the bulges and discs, and use these models to cleanly extract their spectra. Using these spectra, I can look for clues to how these components formed and evolved, and thus better understand how galaxies in general evolve.
For this work, I have written several codes, including BUDDI (Bulge-Disc Decomposition of IFU data), to extract the spectra of galaxy components. I have used BUDDI to study the nuclear star clusters in dwarf galaxies as part of the Next Generation Fornax Survey (NGFS), and to study the bulges, discs and lens components within S0 galaxies in different environments. I am now working to apply this technique to larger samples of galaxies to carry out statistical studies of the spectroscopic properties of galaxy components as a function of mass, environment and morphology.
Prior to my current position, I did my PhD at the University of Nottingham in the UK, finishing in 2014, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Nottingham (May-August 2014), ESO Chile (September 2014-March 2018, with duties at Paranal), and at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (FONDECYT Fellowship, March 2018-January 2021).