ABOUT ME
Growing up in the Welsh country-side, the winter night sky was often crystal clear. I often spent hours outside, wrapped up in warm clothes, staring up at the stars. I was thrilled to go to University in Cardiff to study Astronomy and later did my PhD there. After completing my doctorate, I spent a very enjoyable year lecturing at Cardiff University, before leaving for my first postdoc in Universidad de Concepción in Chile. Living in Chile was a life-changing experience, where I spent 5 years meeting new people, learning a new culture and new language, and met my life-partner. We then lived in South Korea, where I was a research professor at Yonsei University, and then a staff scientist in the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). We recently returned to Chile where I am a researcher and lecturer at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María.
Astronomy, for me, is very important because it has kept my life interesting and has provided me with opportunities that I could never have imagined. I love to collaborate and I’m always meeting new people, in different places, exploring new ideas and creating projects that combine our different skills and perspectives.
At this point in my life, I am thrilled to be able to give something back to the community as a means of saying thank you to all those who supported me during my career (you know who you are ;-) ). As a result, I am an enthusiastic supervisor, who prioritises my students’ needs and enjoys giving time, energy, and input to help and support them with their science and career.
I began my professional career using numerical simulations to model the evolution of galaxies and how they are impacted by the environment in which they live. I create unique and efficient methods to model dense environments, such as those of galaxy clusters, where many thousands of galaxies may pack together in a small volume. I apply my models to study how strong tidal interactions combined with hydrodynamic interactions with hot gas within the cluster can transform galaxies, halting their star formation, stripping out gas and stars, and transforming their morphologies and dynamics. Using an original new approach, we have recently begun modelling the ultra-low surface brightness Universe. This includes streams and shells of material, formed by stripped or destroyed galaxies, that are so faint that they are only just recently being observed now for the first time with state-of-the-art instrumentation.
I have become increasingly interested in using simulations to model galaxy transformation occurring far beyond clusters, in groups of galaxies prior to arriving at the cluster, so called ‘pre-processing’. I have also begun studying galaxy environmental effects in the context of the large scale structure. On scales of tens of Mpc, the Universe has a complex structure, consisting of vast filamentary structures and flattened walls that surround vast underdense regions known as voids. The structures, often referred to as the ‘cosmic web’, can begin changing the manner in which galaxies grow and evolve, long before they arrive in dense environments. I am studying the consequences for the growth and evolution of galaxies, groups, clusters and large scale features, using a combination of the latest observations and our own high resolution cosmological simulations.
An ongoing central goal of my research is the development of new tools for use in astronomy. During my PhD, as a sole theorist surrounded by observational astronomers, I worked hard to develop new techniques using my simulations that could provide useful tools or indicators for application to observations, in order to deepen our understanding and improve our interpretation of observational data. Examples include the use of projected phase-space diagrams to add a time dimension to environmental transformation, an innovative Markov-Chain approach to constrain the orbits of ram pressure stripped galaxies, and development of a novel set of computational science tools for detecting and outlining streams, such as tidal features, or cosmological filaments of the cosmic web. My efforts to aid observations have been reinvigorated with my return to the high observational astronomical community in Chile, to which I strongly hope to contribute through sharing my tools and expertise and through the development of new tools, customised to the local community.
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