About

I am an astrophysicist based at the Kapteyn Institute at the University of Groningen and at the Leiden Observatory. I am working closely with the Euclid team to curate, validate, and distribute the external catalogues and images that will ultimately be complimentary to the exquisite imaging from the Euclid satellite. My main research is on resolved stellar populations in the nearby Universe. I mainly use statistical tools to mine for faint signal in large databases coming from photometric and astrometric surveys. Ultimately I find and model dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, which have only a handful of stars among billions of contaminating ones.

I also have a variety of interests in neighboring fields such as multiple populations in globular clusters, the structure and star formation of the LMC, open clusters, and collisional dynamics.

More recently I have been involved in large spectroscopic surveys such as WEAVE where I coordinate efforts for following up stellar streams and 4MOST, where I am assisting in the construction and tunning of the calibration unit for the spectrograph. Finally, I am also involved in the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC).

Research interests

Here are some of my research interests. Click to read more and see highlights of my main results and any press release related to it.