I am a 39 years-old Spanish astronomer with a PhD in Observational Cosmology, currently working as a PostDoctoral researcher in Brazil at the IAG. This is my story:

I was born in Madrid (Spain) in April 1980. I started my 5-year degree in Physics in 1999 at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM). During the fourth year, i got a Erasmus grant to spend a year studying at the Università degli Studi di Padova in Northern Italy. During that academic year (September 2003 / July 2004), besides the scheduled courses, i collaborated with Professor Alberto Carnera at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) for 6 months in the calibration of a x-ray diffractometer. Back to Spain, i concluded my degree in Physic in September 2006, following a rather peculiar specialization mixing courses from astronomy and optics.

In September 2006, i moved to Tenerife in the Canary Islands (Spain) to start a 1-year master program in Computational Astrophysics at the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). During that period, i acquired knowledge on almost all astronomical topics. From solar physics to Cosmology. Additionally, i developed basic skills in Observational Astronomy (using professional telescopes from the Izaña Astronomical Observatory) and Programming in IDL language.

Once the Master Program was over, i moved to Granada (in Southern Spain) to start my 7-year PhD at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA/CSIC), under the supervision of both Dr. Narciso (Txitxo) Benitez and Pr. Dr. Mariano Moles. During my PhD, i was tasked with the goal of developing an optimized photometric redshift pipeline for the ALHAMBRA survey. During the period, i got a deep insight in multi-band photometry and bayesian photometric redshift techniques. The title of my PhD-thesis was precisely “Accurate Photometry and Photometric Redshift for Cosmological Surveys“. In the meantime, and taking advantage of all the experience i was gathering with my PhD, my advisor Txitxo Benitez nicely invited me to participate in a similar project (the CLASH survey), which was being conducted at the STScI and JHU in the US. Although my main participation was always related to photometric redshifts, step by step, i became more and more envolved in the survey, giving technical support to several groups. In particular, providing photometric redshift analysis to the SNIa and High-z groups. The synergy between both projects represented a great personal and professional experience to me.

After concluding my 7-year PhD program, in September 2014 i got a prestigious 5-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Instituto de Astronomía, Geofísica e Física de la Atmósfera (IAG) at the Universidad de São Paulo (Brazil), to work side-by-side with Pr. Claudia Mendez de Oliveira. Since then, i start participating in three new photometric surveys:      J-PLUS, S-PLUS and J-PAS. In each of the aforementioned projects, my main contribution is always framed in the development of photometric redshift pipelines optimized to the specifications of this projects.

Since 2018, i am an invited professor at the University of La Serena (ULS, Chile), where I participate in the PhD-program teaching an course entitled “Introduction to Modern Cosmology”.

At the present time, i have become interested in how to perfect the problem of conducting membership analysis in clusters of galaxies using Probability Distribution Functions (PDF) from Bayesian Photometric Redshifts.

Here my CV in a nutshell:

 

– Here you can download my CV in:

– A complete list of my scientific publications (ADS) can be found here.

– This is the GoogleMyCitations:  here.