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 the idea that, given the different properties of the 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 the chemical compositions of their atmospheres as well as in their 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, and SEGUE) 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 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.