Research group

There is a good number of scientists working at ESAC who study star- and planet formation and on their connection with newly discovered exoplanet populations. The environment favors the interaction with planetary scientists involved in ESA’s mission to planets and other bodies of the Solar System and with Data Scientists interested in applying modern Machine Learning techniques to the wealth of high quality scientific data in our Science Data Archives. If you fit any of those groups and are interested to work with us, please, do consider applying!!

• ESA Exoplanet Working Group

Trainees, Master and/or Ph.D. students and post-docs:

• Want to join us? Check here for applying to an ESA Research Fellowship (Deadline in the fall) or here for applying for an ESAC Science Traineeship (Deadline in the fall).

Current collaborators:

• Ingo Waldmann, Associate professor on Exo-Planets, University College London (UK).
• Sandor Kruk, Data Scientist at ESA’s Science Directorate, ESAC, Spain.
• Marcel Popescu, Astronomer at the Astronomical Institute at the Romanian Academy.
• Max Guenther, CHEOPS ESA Project Scientist, ESTEC, The Netherlands.
• Matthew Standing, ESA Research Fellow at ESAC, Spain.
• Isa Rebollido, ESA Research Fellow at ESAC, Spain.
• Ross Thomson, Google (USA).
• Samet Karadag, Google Cloud (The Netherlands).

Ph.D. Thesis that I have supervised:

• Pablo García Martín, engineering lead at SAFRAN, France, and Ph.D. student at UAM (Spain) on Automatic identification of asteroids and satellite trails on HST images with AutoML, in Google cloud. Defense date: 28 June 2024, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Thesis.
• Álvaro Ribas, former Ph.D. student, now Research Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Santiago de Chile, Chile.
• Ignacio Bustamante Bengoechea, Ph.D. student at CAB/ESAC, graduated on 22 June 2017 at UAM.
• Isa Oliveira, Ph.D. student at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, graduated on 2011. She is now a Head of Data Science working on booking.com.

Current Ph.D. students that I supervise:

• Antónia Vojteková, Shared Ph.D. student at UCL and at ESA on Sub-Neptune characterisation with CHEOPS and on the application of graphical neural networks and ExplainableIA to the simplication of the physical-chemical modeling of exoplanet atmospheres from new observations. She is based at ESAC, in Madrid.
• Patricio Yael Reller, Shared Ph.D. student in UCL and ESA on Sub-Neptune characterisation with CHEOPS and ASTEP data and on Machine Learning applications to the light-curve analysis of exoplanet transit observations, in preparation for the PLATO mission. He is currently based at France.
• Fabrizio Giordano, senior software engineer at the European Space Astronomy Centre and Ph.D. student at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in FITS-On-Web advanced visualisation technology for Astronomical data, in Madrid.

Former ESA Research Fellows, Ph.D. students, Young Graduate Trainees and science trainees in our group:

• Antónia Vojteková, former ESA Young Graduate Trainee on Astronomical Image Denoising with U-Nets and on recommendation systems for Astronomy data portals, at ESAC, in Madrid, now Ph.D. student on exoplanet atmospheric modeling with graphical neural networks, also at ESAC in Madrid.
• Pablo Riviere Marichalar, former ESA Research Fellow, now research staff at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional (OAN), Madrid, Spain.
• Isabel Rebollido, former ESAC trainee, now postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, USA.
• Catarina Alves de Oliveira, former RF, now head of the SCI-SD division for missions in development at the Science and Operations (SCI-S) department at ESAC, Madrid.
• Hervé Bouy, former RF, now Researcher at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, in Bordeaux, France.
• Silvia Vicente, former RF, later at the University of Groningen, in Groningen, in the Netherlands.
• Loredana Spezzi, former RF, now Remote Sensing Scientists at the EUMETSAT, in Frankfurt, Germany.
• Luca Matrà, former ESAC trainee, now Lecturer in Astronomy at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland.
• Álvaro Ribas, former Ph.D. student, now Research Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Santiago de Chile, Chile.
• Sam Wilkinson, former ESAC science trainee in 2016.
• Ignacio Bustamante Bengoechea, Ph.D. student at CAB/ESAC, graduated on 22 June 2017 at UAM.

Other remote and/or former collaborators include:

• Hervé Bouy, Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, in Bordeaux, France.
• Nuria Huélamo, Staff researcher at the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), ESAC, Spain.
• Héctor Cánovas, support archive scientist for the Gaia mission at the ESAC Science Data Centre, Spain.
• Timo Prusti, ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
• David Ardila, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, CA, USA).
• Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands. and MPE, Garching, Germany.
• Neal Evans, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States.
• Karl Stapelfeldt, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, chief scientist for NASA Exoplanet Exploration Programme.
• Lucas Cieza, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile.
• Paul Harvey, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States.
• Fernando Comerón, European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany.
• Benjamín Montesinos, Centro de Astrobiologia (CAB, Spain).
• Carlos Eiroa, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain).