Research

I’m interested in most things Galactic Archaeology (or ‘near-field cosmology’), but my esearch mostly focuses on the Galactic halo. The pillar of this discipline is that, given the different properties of a galaxy's stellar populations, it should be possible to reconstruct their distinct formation pathways. Because stars retain a long-term ‘memory’ of their origins in both their chemical compositions and kinematics, we can leverage these information to study the formation/evolution of both our Galaxy and its dwarf satellites on a star-by-star basis.

Admittedly, I am someone ‘born’ in the Gaia era. Most of what I do revolves around astrometric and spectro-photometric data provided by the Gaia space mission for metal-poor stars. Also, I make extensive usage of data from large-scale spectroscopic surveys (e.g., APOGEE, GALAH, SEGUE, and S5) to obtain a full chemodynamical view of these old stellar populations. I also perform observations and analysis of low- and high-resolution spectra myself, in particular to derive detailed chemical abundance patterns of stars.

More specific topics of my interest include metal-poor stars, stellar streams and overdensities, star clusters, dwarf galaxies, including both low- and high-resolution stellar spectroscopy.

People is why we do science. With Hélio Perottoni and João A. Amarante, we co-founded the MilkyWayBR group, which is an initiative to bring together Brazilian researchers scattered accross the globe with interest in Galactic Archaeology and ralated topics. We maintain a weekly journal club (in PT-BR) and a Slack channel to facilitate discussions and collaborations. Below, participants of our very first MilkyWayBR large meeting in 2026.