Since March 2018 I am the head of the ESAC Science Data Centre, in charge of developing and operating the science mission archives for all ESA science missions, including Heliophysics, Planetary and Astronomy missions.

After two years at Leiden observatory, I obtained an ESA Research Fellowship to work with Dr. Timo Prusti at the Research and Scientific Support Department of ESTEC, from the European Space Agency, at Noordwijk, in the Netherlands, and continued to work closely with the Leiden and c2d team members, given the proximity of ESTEC and Leiden.

During that time, I also got involved in the testing team of the Mid Infrared Instrument MIRI for the James Webb Space Telescope, which took place at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Oxford in the UK, and participated in the definition of the test plan for the Verification and Flight Models of the instrument. During this period, I also was co-director of the Ph.D. Thesis of Isa Oliveira, together with Prof. Ewine van Dishoeck and Dr. Klaus M. Pontoppidan, and member of ESO’s Observing Program Committee for two calls.

I was awarded my first postdoctoral fellowship by the Fundación Ramón Areces, in Spain, to come to the Leiden Observatory, in the Netherlands, to work with Prof. Ewine F. van Dishoeck (Leiden Sterrewacht, Leiden University) in the analysis of the Spitzer data from the large “Cores 2 Disks” Legacy program, led by Prof. Neal J. Evans, from the University of Texas at Austin (USA).

During this period of time, I had the chance to learn about the data analysis of the images and spectra from the Spitzer Space Telescope and to observe at several world-class ground-based telescopes like the William Herschel and Isaak Newton Telescopes in La Palma Observatory (Spain) or the Very Large Telescopes at Paranal Observatory (Chile) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). I was lucky enough to even obtain open time with NASA’s competitive Spitzer Telescope to observe with the IRS spectrograph on-board Spitzer, a sample of c2d-selected transitional disk candidates in nearby star-forming regions. These transitional disks show signs of having evacuated inner holes in their disks, which are signposts of possible currently on-going planet formation.

I defended my Ph.D. Thesis at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid on March 2004.

During my Ph.D. Thesis I was lucky enough to travel to Morelia, Mexico, to have a collaboration with Dr. Paola D’Alessio, a world-known expert in the physics of protoplanetary disks and author of one of the best numerical models to physically reproduce the observations of such type of objects. After that experience, I was then invited by Profs. Nuria Calvet and Lee Hartman to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA) to make what it was at the time the first public grid of circumstellar disk numerical models offered to the community for scientific analysis of the Spectral Energy Distributions of such objets. These two stages gave me a good visibility of how the cutting-edge science is done in the International context.

I finished my Physics degree in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid on June 1998, with a specialization in Theoretical Physics. After that, I joined LAEFF (“Laboratorio de Astrofisica Espacial y Fisica Fundamental”) of INTA, the Spanish National Technical Institute for Aerospace, where I did my Master and Ph.D. Thesis under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Montesinos and Prof. Carlos Eiroa.

The subject of my Ph.D. thesis was to study the evolution of the circumstellar disks around intermediate mass stars, the so-called Herbig Ae/Be stars, using data from the simultaneous multi-wavelength and multi-telescope EXPORT International Program at La Palma observatory, led by Prof. Carlos Eiroa, from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The goal of this research was to analyze close-to-simultaneous optical to near-IR photometry and optical spectroscopy of moderately large sample of intermediate-mass Herbig Ae/Be stars to get information about the dissipation mechanisms of their disks, which could potentially give information about their potential to form exo-planets.

In July 2015 I became Astronomy Archives Science Lead at the ESAC Science Data Centre.

My work in this group was to try to maximize the scientific use of ESA’s Astronomy science data archives and to contribute to the creation of new modern ways of exploiting that precious space science data. Back then I was also the Product Owner of the ESASky portal.

In October 2008 I joined the Herschel Science Centre, the science operations center of the Herschel Space Observatory, located at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) of the European Space Agency, near Madrid, in Spain. Here I was Data Processing scientist and chair of the Data Processing Users’ Group, a body that coordinated the user input and fed it back into the development plan for the Herschel data reduction software, called HIPE.