Our Team

core Team

in charge of ERIS

Paula Jofré (director)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Biography

P. Jofre is a professor at the Astronomy Nucleus from Diego Portales University. Her main research interests lie in understanding the evolution of the Milky Way using individual stars. She has extensive experience determining and using chemical abundances as a fossil record for galaxy evolution reconstruction, and is one of the pioneers in using “tree thinking” in chemical evolution, for which she has been granted one of the 100 TIME Next in 2019. She has also provided the fundamental reference sets of stars dubbed as Gaia benchmark stars for large spectroscopic surveys, leading an important Annual Review on industrial stellar abundances. P. Jofre obtained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (Germany) and her Bachelor degree at the Pontifical Catholic University (Chile).

Website: paulajofre.com

Patricia Tissera (co-director)

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Biography

Patricia Tissera a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and leads the Numerical Galaxy Formation group. She was a principal researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Argentina, 1998-2017) and full professor at Universidad Andres Bello (2017-2020). She did her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Astronomy at the National University of Córdoba and postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford (1995) and jointly at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (1996-1997). She has received several awards recognising her work and has a solid experience in supervising young researchers. Her areas of interest are: Galaxy Formation, Chemical Evolution, Cosmology and Numerical Simulations.

Website: patriciatissera.com

Evelyn Johnston (PI)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Biography

E. Johnston is a professor in the Núcleo de Astronomía at the Universidad Diego Portales. She studied Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and obtained my PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Nottingham, also in the UK. She has held postdoctoral positions at ESO and the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile before joining UDP, and has worked as a support astronomer at the Isaac Newton Telescope in la Palma and the VLT in Chile. Johnston is an expert in the formation and evolution of nearby galaxies, and her work focuses on understanding morphological transformations of galaxies through spectroscopic decomposition and the formation of dwarf galaxies through analysis of their stellar populations. She has extensive experience in gathering and preparing observational data, particularly IFU data, and is Co-PI of the BUDDI-MaNGA project.

Website: https://evelynj.github.io

Álvaro Rojas-Arriagada (PI)

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Biography

A. Rojas-Arriagada is a researcher at the Millenium Institute of Astrophysics, working at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He got a PhD in astrophysics at the Laboratoire Lagrange of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice , France. Rojas-Arriagada research interests lie in Galactic archaeology, as a research subject, and in stellar spectroscopy, as technical expertise. A main part of his past and present research has been based on the scientific exploitation of large spectroscopic, photometric and astrometric surveys of the Milky Way, in particular the bulge.

partners

support with expertise and ideas

Claudia Aguilera Gómez

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Biography

Claudia is a chilean postdoc who obtained her undergraduates and postgraduates from Pontificia Universidad Católica, in Chile. Her research interests and expertise are on stellar evolution theory and the chemical composition and characterization of stars. She is interested in studying the different chemical patterns of stars to understand if these are produced because of the evolution of the Galaxy, regular stellar evolution, or an unusual process that could be acting to modify the abundance of stars.

Payel Das

astrophysicist from University of Surrey, UK.

Biography

P. Das is a UKRI Future Leader Fellow in the Astrophysics Research Group at the University of Surrey. She uses models of the motions and ‘chemical fingerprints’ of stars to reveal the evolutionary histories of galaxies from chemodynamical data of their stellar populations. She is also interested in how we can optimally exploit chemodynamical data using machine-learning tools and non-linear data structures such as trees. With P. Jofre, she was one of the first to use tree structures in chemical evolution studies. P. Das got her Master’s degree at the University of Oxford (UK) and PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Germany).

Website: drpayeldas.com

Robert Foley

antropologist from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Biography

Robert Foley is Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution, Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of King’s College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is a co-founder of the Leverhulme Centre of Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge, an interdisciplinary research centre. His research has focused on the evolution and ecology of humans, especially their behavior and adaptations. Much of this work has concentrated on understanding humans in terms of general Darwinian patterns and processes, and relating human evolution to more general models of evolution, and the general applicability of phylogenetic approaches. Among his contributions are the development of off-site archaeology, community ecology and co-evolutionary approaches to hominin evolution, ecological models for human evolution, phylogenetic methods for analysing technological, cultural, social and linguistic evolution, the multiple dispersal model of human origins, and multi-disciplinary approaches to the evolution of human diversity.

Gerry Gilmore

astrophysicist from University of Cambridge, UK.

Biography

Gilmore is a professor of Experimental Philosophy. He studied mathematical physics in the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and obtained his PhD in Astrophysics from the Canterbury University. G. Gilmore focuses his analysis in Galaxy structure and evolution, Galactic dynamics and chemical evolution. He has been granted Neils Bohr Lecturer, Argelander Lecturer, Lovell Lecturer, Einstein UNESCO Lecturer, Bedford Lecturer, Chalonge and deVega medals, and is Fellow of major international science academies, including the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics, the NZ Royal Society, Academia Europea, and several others.
He leads major research projects, including the ERC-funded Gaia-ESO Survey, and is UK PI of the ESA Gaia mission, and EC-funded strategy/policy coordination projects including OPTICON and its successor the OPTICON-RadioNet Pilot.

Website: www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~gil

Xia Hua

mathematical biologist from Australian National University

Biography

X. Hua is a lecturer at the Mathematical Science Institute at Australian National University. Her research interests are in biological mathematics and biostatistics, focused on the fundamental rules of evolutionary processes and on developing mathematical tools to apply evolutionary thinking in solving real-world problems. She is one of the recipients of 2019 Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for her work in evolutionary biology. She is also one of the recipients of 2021 Eureka prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research for her work on language evolution. X. Hua obtained her PhD at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and her Bachelor degree at Fudan University.

Alejandro Maass

mathematician from Universidad de Chile

Biography

He studied Mathematical Engineering at the University of Chile and then moved to France where he obtained the PhD degree at the Institut de Mathématiques de Luminy of Université Aix-Marseille in Marseille. His thesis was focused on the ergodic theory of cellular automata and local entropy theory in topological dynamics. In 2000 he joined the newly created UMI-CNRS Center of Mathematical Modeling (CMM) at University of Chile. Since then, he has been conducting fundamental and applied research in both ergodic theory and systems biology. In 2002 he created the Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Mathematics of the Genome at CMM to provide computational and mathematical tools to solve real life biotechnological challenges from a mathematical perspective. The same techniques developed for bioinformatics motivated ideas in astroinformatics. His work in stimulating scientific cooperation with France was recognized with the distinction “Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite”.

Jaime San Martin

mathematician from Universidad de Chile

Biography

J. San Martin Aristegui studied Mathematical Engineering at the Universidad de Chile and did his PhD in Statistics at Purdue University. He is a member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences. His main research has focused on Probability Theory, mainly on properties of Brownian Motion, Backward Stochastic Differential Equations, Potential Theory and its link with Linear Algebra. He has worked in the modeling of earthquakes, dispersal of pests and in recent years in astroinformatics, creating the first laboratory on this subject in Chile in 2009. He is currently the scientific director of the Chilean National SuperComputing Laboratory, which he created in 2010.

Emanuel Sillero

astrophysicist at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Biography

Emanuel is a postdoc funded by an ALMA-Anid grant. He graduated as a doctor in 2020 from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, working at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Astronomy (IATE). During his doctorate and after, his research has focused on the use of numerical simulations to study the chemical content of galaxies, its origin and distribution, and its relation with the star formation activity and several dynamic processes experienced by galaxies. In the last year he finished with the update of a hydrodynamic code that will allow a more detailed description of chemical evolution in cosmic structures.

Robert Yates

astrophysicist from the University of Surrey, UK.

Biography

His main research interests are in galaxy formation theory and observations, in particular the chemical evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters. He is a main developer of the L-Galaxies simulation, which he uses in synergy with spectroscopic data from large surveys and integral field units (IFUs). He is also a member of the EDGE2.0 simulation management group. R. Yates obtained his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in 2014, and his Masters degree in Physics from Imperial College London.

Manuela Zoccali

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Biography

Zoccali is a professor and deputy director of the Institute of Astrophysics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica. She’s also a member, and former director, of the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics. She obtained her PhD at the University of Padova (Italy) and was a fellow at ESO in Garching before coming to Chile as a postdoc and then as a professor. She’s interested in stellar populations in the Milky Way Galaxy, especially in the Galactic bulge. She studies the 3D structure, age, chemical composition and variable star content of the massive, central region of the Milky Way, with the final goal of disclosing its formation scenario. She coordinates the massive outreach activities of the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics.

Students and young researchers

do most of the work

Danielle de Brito Silva (PhD student)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Biography

Obtained her Bachelor Degree in Physics from the Institute of Physics at University of São Paulo, Brazil. She is mainly interested in stellar populations, Galactic Archeology and what metal-poor stars can tell us about the history of the Milky Way and the Universe. In order to explore these topics, she determines chemical abundances of metal-poor stars from high-resolution spectra observed by large telescopes located in Chile as well as their dynamical properties, she also uses the ages of stars and explores data from surveys such as Gaia, APOGEE and GALAH. She aims to combine all this information together with simulations of galaxies in order to build stellar phylogenetic trees and study the evolutionary history of the Milky Way.

Anell Cornejo Cárdenas (Master student)

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Biography

Anell completed her undergraduate degrees in physics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is interested in understanding the evolution and structure of galaxies. Anell is focused on studying the fundamental relationships of galaxies at local scales and testing whether these relationships can be reproduced by numerical simulations. To do so, she is working with hydrodynamic cosmological simulations of galaxies which will be combined with SEDs to estimate the spectrum of the stellar populations in order to mimic IFU observations. With this tool, we will be able to estimate the evolution of spatial-resolved properties along the merger trees of galaxies.

Camilla Eldridge (ERIS postdoctoral fellow)

biologist from Universidad Diego Portales

Biography

Camilla gained her PhD at Kingston University London in evolutionary genetics and bioinformatics where she explored the dynamics of host – parasite systems and used molecular clocks to trace the evolutionary history of parasite populations. Her background and expertise includes evolutionary biology, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. She is fascinated by astronomy and interested in applying ideas from evolutionary biology to study stellar evolution. Currently she is exploring methods for building galactic phylogenies.

Scarlet S. Elgueta (ERIS postdoctoral fellow)

Astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Biography

Scarlet is a Chilean astronomer who obtained her PhD in Astronomy at the University of Tokyo, Japan. She is mainly focused in the study of infrared bands to characterize fundamental stellar parameters of stars, as well as to explore the exotic infrared bands looking for chemical elements that can help us tracing the history of our galaxy.

Jenny González (PhD student)

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Biography

She has an undergraduate degree in Astrophysics from the same university. Jenny is working on the formation of stellar haloes and their coevolution with other dynamical components such as the bulge and the disc, using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations.

Keerthana Jegatheesan (PhD student)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Biography

Keerthana is currently exploring galaxies in the nearby local Universe using integral field spectroscopic data. With the SDSS-MaNGA survey, she is studying the origin and evolution of galaxy bulges and discs by tracing back their star formation histories. Through this, she hopes to understand how different physical processes affect different components of galaxies to ultimately shape their personalities. She hails from India, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Physics, followed by a master’s degree with an astronomy specialization at Aix-Marseille Université in France. Through her master’s project, she had the chance to appreciate the application of machine learning in astronomy, particularly in galaxy evolution, which continues to hold her interest.

Theosamuele Signor (PhD student)

Astrophysicist and computer scientist From Universidad Diego Portales and INRIA Chile

Biography

Theo is from Italy, where he first obtained a degree in Astronomy and then a master’s in Data Science for Physics, both at the University of Padua. His interests are mainly to leverage large data sets and machine learning techniques to study galaxy evolution.

Sara Vitali (PhD student)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Biography

Sara completed her undergraduate degrees in physics from Turin University in Italy and her Masters degree in astrophysics at the Potsdam University in Germany. She is interested in understanding how the Milky Way assembled, in particular what is the role of merging events. She is focused on understanding the properties of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, which is currently going through a merging process with the Milky Way. To do so, Sara is learning about chemical evolution models of dwarf galaxies and leading observing campaigns to obtain spectra of Sagittarius stars.

Kurt Walsen Bluee-Blatter (undergrad student)

mathematician from Universidad de Chile

Biography

Kurt is finishing his undergraduate studies in mathematics at the Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas, Universidad de Chile. His interests in mathematics are because everything one learns and uses had to be proven first, and the relevant things mathematics could explain in other fields of science like chemistry and physics made him understand the versatility that mathematics has in science, so he is becoming a mathematical engineer (and taking elective courses in astronomy and informatics) in order to have that versatility and hopefully work for science projects. He is involved in this astronomy project being a mathematician, and so being able to merge both of his favorite fields of science.

Keaghan Yaxley (PhD student)

biologist from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Biography

Keaghan completed his undergraduate degrees in biology and history at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, including an honours project with the Macroevolution and Macroecology lab, investigating how evolutionary trees could be employed to assist with protecting endangered species. In 2018 he moved to Cambridge UK to undertake a MPhil at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies. His research centres around phylogenetics – the construction and analysis of evolutionary trees. He is interested in using phylogenetic techniques to build trees for alternative datasets, including fossil species, languages and stars, as well as investigating the shape and structure of evolutionary trees to make inferences about past evolutionary processes.

Sense Contents

Our Team

in charge of ERIS

Paula Jofré (director)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Patricia Tissera (co-director)

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Evelyn Johnston (PI)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Álvaro Rojas-Arriagada (PI)

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

support with expertise and ideas

Claudia Aguilera Gómez

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Payel Das

astrophysicist from University of Surrey, UK.

Robert Foley

antropologist from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Gerry Gilmore

astrophysicist from University of Cambridge, UK.

Xia Hua

mathematical biologist from Australian National University

Alejandro Maass

mathematician from Universidad de Chile

Jaime San Martin

mathematician from Universidad de Chile

Emanuel Sillero

astrophysicist at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Robert Yates

astrophysicist from the University of Surrey, UK.

Manuela Zoccali

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

do most of the work

Danielle de Brito Silva (PhD student)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Anell Cornejo Cárdenas (Master student)

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Camilla Eldridge (ERIS postdoctoral fellow)

biologist from Universidad Diego Portales

Scarlet S. Elgueta (ERIS postdoctoral fellow)

Astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Jenny González (PhD student)

astrophysicist from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Keerthana Jegatheesan (PhD student)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Theosamuele Signor (PhD student)

Astrophysicist and computer scientist From Universidad Diego Portales and INRIA Chile

Sara Vitali (PhD student)

astrophysicist from Universidad Diego Portales

Kurt Walsen Bluee-Blatter (undergrad student)

mathematician from Universidad de Chile

Keaghan Yaxley (PhD student)

biologist from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Communications and Management

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