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 Exoplanets. 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, do consider applying!!

• ESAC Exoplanet and Protoplanetary disks group
• Machine Learning 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:

• Ivan Valtchanov, calibration scientist at the XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre, ESAC, Spain.
• Sandor Kruk, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Munich, Germany.
• Ross Thomson, Google (USA).
• Samet Karadag, Google Cloud (The Netherlands).
• Ingo Waldmann, Associate professor on Exo-Planets, University College London (UK).

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 on Machine Learning applications to the spectroscopic retrieval of exoplanet observations, in preparation for the ARIEL mission. He is currently based at France.
• 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 Madrid.
• Fabrizio Giordano, senior software engineer at the ESAC Science Data 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 Development Manager for the SMILE mission and for the ARIEL exoplanet mission 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).