Jean-Philippe Berger received his PhD from Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble in 1998. He has been a post-doctoral fellow of the French Space Agency (CNES) were he developed integrated optics combiners for optical interferometry. He later moved to Harvard-SAO Center for Astrophysics as a NASA Michelson Fellow working in the IOTA team. He was hired as astronomer at Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (Grenoble Observatory) in 2002.
His astronomical research focus since its beginning pushes the use of long-baseline optical interferometry to study the inner astronomical units of pre-main sequence stars with a specific emphasis on aperture synthesis imaging. His research has lead him to collaborate in various instrumental projects related to optical interferometry: IONIC-VINCI, IONIC3-IOTA, SMART-IOTA, MIRC-CHARA, VSI, Gravity.

Stephane Brillant is an Operations Astronomer at the Paranal observatory. He received his PhD in physics from the University of Paris XI in 1999. After 2 years as a student in ESO during his PhD he came back in 1999 as a fellow and moved in 2001 to his current position in Paranal. While his PhD was more in theoretical physics, he moved to more observational study and has been working mostly on microlensing. In particular his work with the Planet project involved using microlensing events to search for planets around other stars but also to study the composition of stellar atmospheres. As part of his function in the observatory he is responsible of the operations of the Auxiliary Telescopes and will act as Prima instrument scientist when the instrument arrives on Paranal.

Giovanni Carraro is a support astronomer at VLT Paranal. He received his PhD in Astronomy from Padova University in 1996. He was a postdoc at SISSA/ISAS and Padova University, and later he was Andes Fellow at Yale and the Universidad de Chile. Since 1999 he holds an assistant professorship at Padova University. His scientific interests include open star clusters and Milky Way structure and evolution, Galaxy formation, and small objects in the solar system.

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Itziar de Gregorio-Monsalvo did her PhD at the National Institute for Aerospace Technology (Spain). During her thesis, she participated in technical and observational activities at the Madrid NASA station. After obtaining her PhD degree in 2006, she joined ESO as a fellow dedicated to the ALMA project. During her postdoc, she performed duties at the APEX telescope (Chile), and at the ALMA Test Facility (ATF) in New Mexico (USA). She has been also involved in testing and commissioning activities at the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF), in Atacama.  She is a specialist on single-dish and interferometric techniques in Radio Astronomy. Her current scientific interests are mainly focused on low-mass young stellar objects, Bok globules, and protoplanetary disks. She is also working on astrophysical masers, young brown dwarfs and multiple proto-stellar systems. Since 2010 she is an Operations Astronomer at ALMA.

Willem-Jan de Wit is a VLTI support astronomer. His scientific interest is star formation and in particular the formation of massive stars. With the VLTI, he studies the harsh environment of the immediate vicinity of massive stars during their assembly process. His research involves the properties of young stellar clusters and how they relate to the character of massive star formation in Galaxies. He received his PhD from the University of Utrecht in 2001.

Christophe Dumas is a planetary astronomer at ESO-Chile, sharing his time between science operations activities at Paranal Observatory, where he is the Deputy Head for operations and instrument scientist for the adaptive optics integral field near-infrared spectrograph SINFONI, and his personal research, which consists to study the physical processes involved in the formation of planetary systems. Specifically, he uses high-contrast and high-angular-resolution observing techniques to investigate key-questions about the origin of our solar system (original composition of the solar nebula, how did accrete the first planetesimals, what is the role of collision in planetary formation?), which can find answers in the study of the most primitive objects it contains (comets, trans-neptunians, small satellites of the outer planets ...), as well as from the physical characterization of young exo-planetary systems.
Christophe Dumas obtained his PhD in 1997 from the University of Paris Denis-Diderot (France), after graduating as an engineer from "Supélec", the French "Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité". Priorly to joining ESO, he was a staff scientist at the NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (USA) where he worked for 6 years in the preparation and development of space missions related to the NASA Origins program (Terrestrial Planet Finder, Space Inteferometer Mission, Astrobiology Explorer). He also worked at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii (USA) as a junior scientist during his graduate years.

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Michael Dumke
(APEX/SCV)

Michael Dumke is support astronomer at the APEX project. He received his PhD from Bonn University in 1997 for his work on the interstellar medium in nearby galaxies. Since then, he gained a lot of experience in radio astronomical instrumentation and techniques as a post-doc or staff member at IRAM Grenoble, the Heinrich-Hertz Submillimeter Telescope in Arizona, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn. In 2004, he joined ESO as part of the science operations team of the APEX telescope. His main research interests are molecular gas at low and high redshift, disk-halo interaction, magnetic fields, cold dust, and the ISM in general in normal and active galaxies.

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Diego Garcia-Appadoo
(ALMA)

Diego Garcia-Appadoo is an ALMA Operations Astronomer since January 2011. He obtained his Degree, Masters and PhD at Cardiff University in the UK, working on blind, HI surveys and the properties of HI-selected galaxies. After which he did a two year postdoc at the Radioastronomy Institute of the University of Bonn followed by 3.5 years as an ESO Fellow with duties at ALMA. His scientific and research interests lie on the gas (atomic and molecular) and dust properties of galaxies.

Julien Girard
(PAO/SCV)

Julien Girard is a Paranal Operations Staff Astronomer. He joined ESO in 2009 as Adaptive Optics (AO) specialist to support the NaCo instrument as well as current/future AO facilities. He obtained a master's degree in Instrumentation Physics from the University of Utah after building a calibration system for the HiRes ultra-high-energy cosmic ray experiment. Back to the French Alps, he completed another master's in Astrophysics in Grenoble and tested integrated optics recombiners for long baseline interferometry. Appealed by high angular resolution instrumentation, he defended a PhD in 2005 at CRAL/Observatoire de Lyon for his contribution to the polichromatic laser guide star project ELPOA. Julien worked three years in Mexico City as a postdoctoral fellow at UNAM and as a professor at IPN. He helped developing a curvature based AO system in the laboratory and was involved in the robotization of telescopes for optical to infrared synoptic surveys and gamma ray bursts followups. His astronomical research interests are broad, from brown dwarf companion search to active galacti nuclei multi-wavelength characterization. Julien also enjoys participating to public outreach activities.

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George Hau
(PAO/SCV)

George Hau received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1998. After postdoctoral positions at P.U. Catolica, ESO (as Fellow and EFOSC2 Instrument Scientist), Durham and Swinburne, George returned to ESO as Operations Staff Astronomer in 2010, supporting the adaptive optics effort at ESO. He is currently the second instrument scientist of NaCo. George has broad interests on galaxy formation, in particular in using the morphological, kinematic and stellar population signatures to perform "Galaxy Archaeology". He has studied some of the most and least massive galaxies in the nearby Universe. Two of his favourite topics are kinematically decoupled cores (KDCs) and shells in early-type galaxies.

Richard Hills
(ALMA)

Richard Hills joined ESO and took up the post of Project Scientist on ALMA on November 1st 2007.  He and his wife Beverly Bevis have moved to Santiago from Cambridge in England, where he was Professor of Radio Astronomy.  Although he has only now joined the ALMA project full-time, he has been associated with it for many years.  In particular he has led the development of the system which will be used on ALMA for correcting the effects of atmospheric fluctuations – essentially the millimetre-wave equivalent of the adaptive optics systems now being used on Optical/IR telescopes.
Before that, Richard Hills was involved in the development of telescopes and instrumentation for millimetre wavelength astronomy for many years.  For his Ph.D. thesis he worked with Jack Welch on the first version of the millimetre-wave interferometer at Hat Creek in California and after moving to England he became Project Scientist for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, which is on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.  Although he is primarily an instrumentalist he maintains a scientific interest in almost the whole range of things that can presently be done with millimetre-wave telescopes - from observations of solar system objects, the formation of stars and planets through to the emission from high redshift galaxies and quasars.  With ALMA there will be a still wider range of opportunities to be explored!

Valentin D. Ivanov was born on August 1, 1967 in the town of Burgas, Bulgaria. He holds a Master of Science in Physics, with specialization in Astronomy from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria (1992) and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Arizona, Tucson (2001). He was a ESO Fellow from 2001 to 2003 at the Paranal Observatory, and ESO staff astronomer at the La Silla Observatory from 2004 to 2007. Currently, Valentin is a ESO staff astronomer at Paranal. His main research interests are stellar populations of distant galaxies and transiting extrasolar planets.

Andreas Kaufer is the Director of the La Silla Paranal Observatory. He received his degree in Physics from Heidelberg University in 1993. In 1996 he graduated with a PhD in Astronomy from the same university. He became ESO staff member in 1999 and joined the VLT Science Operations department. He has been the Paranal instrument scientists of UVES and later FLAMES. In 2003 he became the instrumentation scientist of the La Silla Paranal Observatory. His research activities focus on the fields of stellar astrophysics, galaxy evolution, and state-of-the-art astronomical instrumentation.

Rüdiger Kneissl joined ESO in 2009 as Science Operations Astronomer in the ALMA project. He received his PhD from the University of Munich and the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in 1997. During appointments at the University of Cambridge, UC Berkeley and MPI for Radio Astronomy in Bonn he worked with various radio interferometers and the APEX telescope. He has also been involved in the Planck satellite mission for many years. His main scientific interest is in observational cosmology with studies of the cosmic microwave background, galaxy clusters via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and high-redshift dusty galaxies.

Cédric Ledoux is an operations staff astronomer at the Paranal observatory, currently deputy of the Head of the Paranal Science Operations Department and coordinator of the General Operations groups. He has been the instrument scientist responsible for UVES, the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph at the VLT, between 2003 and 2008.
He started his career at ESO La Silla observatory in 1995-1996 as French cooperant and received his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Strasbourg and Lyon observatories (France) in December 1999. He was subsequently awarded a science fellowship at ESO Garching in Germany before moving back to Chile in 2002. His main research interests are the properties and evolution of galaxies as revealed by QSO absorption-line systems, the population of faint Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies at high redshift, and the interstellar medium in the host galaxies of Gamma-Ray Bursts. 

Stéphane Leon Tanne is System Astronomer at ALMA. He received his PhD from the University Paris 7 in 1998. His main interests are the effects of the environment on stellar systems. He studied the tidal tails in globular clusters using wide field telescopes and numerical simulations. While he was working at IRAM (Spain) he studied the dynamics of the molecular gas in galaxies using single-dish and interferometer telescopes. Since his post-docs at ASIAA (Taiwan) and at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (Spain) he works actively on the ISM content of radio galaxies, barred and isolated galaxies.

Robert Lucas
(ALMA)

Robert Lucas joined ESO and ALMA in Santiago on August 1st as Commissioning Scientist. After some early years in Paris (Meudon Observatory and École Normale Supérieure), he became Professor at Grenoble University in 1980. He then joined IRAM in 1987 where his main contributions to the development of the Plateau de Bure Array have been science commissioning, and the on-line and off-line calibration software (CLIC). He has been deeply involved in ALMA since 1999, mainly as a member of Computing IPT, but also participated in the Antenna evaluation activities and in the Science IPT. His research interests have been mainly focused on circumstellar envelopes, molecular and diffuse interstellar clouds (radiative transfer, chemistry, observations).

Gianni Marconi is the Instrument Operation Teams Coordinator for the LSP Observatory. He received his PhD in astronomy from Bologna University in 1992; after a 2 year fellowship at ESO Garching he has held the position of Researcher at the Observatory of Rome. From 1999 he has been a VLT staff astronomer at the Paranal Observatory where until January 2007 he was also Instrument Scientist for VIMOS. His main research is focused on the study of stellar populations in different environments, as observational test for stellar models, galaxy evolution and cosmology. His research interests include: star formation and chemical evolution history of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group; age, evolution and dynamics in Galactic globular and open clusters. Other scientific interests: anomalous X-ray pulsars and high resolution spectroscopy of high redshift GRBs. Other technical interests: astronomical instrumentation and adaptive optics.

Christophe Martayan joined ESO in 2009 as Paranal support astronomer and will be FLAMES instrument scientist. He received his PhD in Physics-astrophysics from Paris XI University and Meudon Observatory, France in 2005. By after he was employed at the ESO-Garching, the Paris Observatory, and  the Royal Observatory of Belgium. He worked as manager of modules for the scientific preparation of the GAIA space mission, and on the analysis of million of spectra taken with the ESO-WFI in its slitless mode. His current research activities concern the stellar evolution of massive and emission-line stars (O, B, Be, LBV, GRB) in different environments of metallicity (Milky Way, Magellanic Clouds, etc). He is also involved in the GAIA space mission about emission-line stars and in the scientific preparation of a multi-object spectrograph for the E-ELT.

Gautier Mathys is Lead Astronomer of the Proposal Handling Team. He obtained his PhD in Physics in 1983, and his Habilitation in 1990, both at the University of Liege. After 8 years in Switzerland (first at the ETH in Zurich, then at the Geneva Observatory), he moved to ESO-Chile in 1991, where he worked as support astronomer at the La Silla Observatory and, as of 1998, at the Paranal Observatory; in particular he was Head of Science Operations from 1999 to early 2006. From 2006 to 2011, he was Head of ESO's  Observing Programmes Office, in charge of the support of the observing proposal selection process. His main research interests are stellar magnetic fields and stellar pulsation, with particular emphasis on the chemically peculiar A- and B-type stars.

Rainer Mauersberger
(ALMA)

Rainer Mauersberger works as a Commisioning Scientist in the ALMA project. He received his PhD from the University of Bonn using the MPIfR 100m telescope to measure ammonia thoughout the galaxy. The galactic and extragalactic cold interstellar medium remained his main field of investigation while he was working at the Sub-mm Telescope Observatory in Arizona and Pico Veleta Observatory in Granada (Spain), where he served as the station manager for nine years.

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Jorge Melnick
(SCV/GAR)

Jorge Melnick is the VLT Programme Scientist.  His research interests include violent star formation, Galactic and extragalactic starbursts, and the evolution of  massive stars. Currently he is working on cosmology (HII galaxies as distance indicators) and the assembly history of clusters of galaxies using population synthesis of the intracluster light.

Claudio Melo
(PAO/SCV)

Claudio Melo is an Associate Astronomer at ESO. His main interests focus in finding planets in different environments such as open clusters, metal poor stars and young stars. His duties are carried out at Paranal Observatory as Operation Staff Astronomer.  From the technical point of view, Claudio is familiar with high-precision radial velocity measurements and interested in how to overcome the different sources of noise to reach the 10cm/s precision with ESPRESSO and eventually to find an exo-Earth. For the coming years, he is willing to develop new projects in the field of Astrobiology.

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Antoine Mérand
(PAO/SCV)

Antoine Mérand is an Operation Astronomer at Paranal, specialized in optical interferometry. He received his PhD in astronomy from Paris University (France) in 2005. After he graduated, he went to the CHARA Array interferometer (California, USA) to work on instrumentation developments and to complete observation programs he started during his PhD. His main interests are Cepheids pulsating stars, stellar fundamental parameters. In 2008, he joined ESO as an astronomer, mainly to work on the operation and the development of the VLTI. He currently acts as PRIMA instrument scientist and AMBER second instrument scientist.

Steffen Mieske
(PAO/SCV)

Steffen Mieske obtained his PhD in astronomy in 2005 from Bonn University. Between 2000 and 2004 he spent about 3 years in Chile at PUC, pursueing research for his Master's and PhD theses. In 2005 he joined ESO as a fellow in Garching. He moved to ESO Chile in August 2008 as Staff Astronomer and supportsscience operations of the wide-field imagers, in particular OmegaCAM,VIRCAM, and VIMOS. His scientific interests comprise the high-mass end of the globular cluster population and ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs), and generally the internal dynamics of compact stellar systems. He also works on photometric properties of extragalactic dwarf galaxies, such as their scaling relations and luminosity function. During his PhD time, he studied the shape of the Hubble flow in the "Great Attractor" region.

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Yazan Momany
(PAO/SCV)

Yazan Momany was born on August 20th of 1970 in Al-Zarqa (Jordan). In 1996 he obtained a master degree in Astronomy from the University of Bologna (Italy), and in 2001 he obtained his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Padova (Italy). In the same year he joined the EIS team at ESO/Garching and for 7 months he worked on the release of the first Pre-Flames images and catalogs after which he did a 5 year post-doc at the University of Padova. Since 2006 he held a position of Research Astronomer at the Padova observatory, and in August 2008 he moved to ESO/Santiago to join the science operation team of the Paranal observatory. His scientific interests comprise the study of resolved stellar populations, and the characterization of their properties such as age, metallicity, distance and star formation history. In particular, he has conducted research on the UV-properties of hot horizontal branch stars in Galactic Globular Clusters, on the optical and near IR properties of "cool" red giant and asymptotic branch stars of Local Group dwarf galaxies, and on the Milky Way structure and formation.

Lorenzo Monaco
(PAO/SCV)

Lorenzo Monaco is an ESO Staff astronomer with duty station in Santiago and Paranal Observatory. He received the PhD in astronomy from the Bologna University in 2004. After covering a postdoctoral position at the Trieste Observatory, he joined ESO as research Fellow working at the La Silla Observatory. Between 2008 and 2010 he has been working at the Concepcion University (Chile). His research activity is focused on the study of resolved stellar populations in the Local Group with the main aims of (i) understanding the processes which drive galaxy formation and (ii) testing observationally the viable solutions to the challenges posed to our current comprehension of stellar evolution. He is proficient in the computation of model atmospheres, synthetic spectra and abundance analysis with the Kurucz codes (ATLAS, SYNTHE,....). His technical expertise also include PSF fitting techniques for photometry in crowded stellar field.

Theodoros Nakos
(ALMA)

Theodoros (Thodori) Nakos joined ESO in September 2011 as ALMA Test Scientist.  He received his PhD from the University of Liège, in Belgium, but he spent two years in Chile as an ESO PhD student. During his PhD he worked on the selection of quasar candidates using near-infrared imaging data, and their identification using multi-wavelength information spanning from X-rays to mid-IR. He then spent five years as a post-doc at the University of Ghent, as a member of the test and calibration team for MIRI, one of the instruments on-board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Thodori has been involved in various projects related to the detection and follow-up observations of non-lensed, gravitationally-lensed or broad-absorption line (BAL) quasars, and Active Galactic Nuclei, in general. He has also been involved in the study of the physical properties of the torus in AGN via radiative transfer modeling, and the detection of very high-z quasars using the NIRCam and MIRI instruments on-board JWST.

Dieter Nürnberger is Operations Staff Astronomer at the Paranal La Silla Observatory. He studied Physics and Astronomy at the University of Würzburg in Germany and, during his time as PhD student, he has held research assistant positions at the University of Würzburg and at IRAM Grenoble in France. He received his PhD in astronomy from the University of Würzburg in 2004. He joined ESO in 2002 as research fellow and became staff astronomer in 2006. He is expert in both infrared and (sub)millimeter astronomy. He currently supports the science operations of all infrared instruments at the VLT and, in particular, acts as instrument scientist of VISIR. His research interests are primarily focused on the earliest phases of high mass star formation and on the formation of stars in clusters. Since 2006 he coordinates the activities of the "star formation and (sub)millimeter astronomy" group at ESO Vitacura.

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Emanuela Pompei is working as FORS instrument scientist at the Paranal La Silla Observatory. She obtained her PhD from University of Trieste in Italy in 1999 and joined ESO the same year. She has worked both on La Silla and on Paranal as Boller&Chivens, DFOSC, FEROS, EMMI and NTT instrument scientist and WFI and EFOSC2 support astronomer. Her research interests center on the dynamics and chemical evolution of galaxies and on compact groups of galaxies, as probes of the evolution of large scale structures.

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Sridharan Rengaswamy
(PAO/SCV)

Sridharan Rengaswamy, born in Srirangam, Tamil Nadu, India, obtained his Masters degree in Physics from St. Joseph's College, Tiruchirappalli and Ph.D in Astronomy from Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangaluru University, Bangaluru, India. He worked on speckle and interferometric imaging techniques. He developed a speckle masking code and used it to study small scale solar features. After three years of post doctoral work on solar adaptive optics at Udaipur Solar Observatory, Physical Research Laboratory, India, he took up his second post doctoral position at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA. He worked for a JPL-STScI project on `Crowded field astrometry with the Space Interferometry Mission'. He then moved to the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands to work on Seismic interferometry. Simultaneously, he also worked as a postdoc at the Leiden Observatory on problems related to LOFAR calibration. He joined ESO at Chile in January 2009, where he works as the VLTI-Science Operations support astronomer. His research interest includes optical/infra-red/radio interferometric imaging, adaptive optics, software development, solar physics, crowded field astrometry, young stellar objects and circumstellar environments.

Thomas Rivinius has studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he got his PhD in 1998. After three years of ESO fellowship in Garching he returned to Heidelberg to become "Privatdozent". Since 2005 he's back at ESO, this time in Chile as science operations support astronomer on Paranal at the VLTI. Currently, he's the intrument scientist for MIDI. His research focusses on hot stars and their circumstellar environments, covering stellar pulsation, hot star winds, magnetic O and B-type stars, and Be stars and their disks.

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Ivo Saviane got his Ph.D. in 1997 at the University of Padova, with a thesis on old populations of Local Group galaxies and clusters. After receiving his Ph.D., he had several postdoc positions: the first one in Padova and the second at UCLA. During this time, the case of SagDIG stimulated his interest in dwarf irregular galaxies, and he started a project to investigate the luminosity-metallicity relation for such objects. In 2001 he moved to ESO, first as a fellow and later as a staff astronomer, where he's currently the EMMI instrument scientist at La Silla. He has been head of the IR instrument force, and TIMMI2 and EFOSC2 instrument scientist. Up to now his best-selling paper is the 1999 investigation on the relative ages of Galactic globular clusters. Among other results are the discovery of population II stars in Leo I, and of a young globular cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Recently he revised the distance to the Antennae galaxies, and he's getting some fruits from the dwarf irregulars project.

Linda Schmidtobreick did her studies and PhD (1997) at the Ruhruniversitaet Bochum, Germany about the structure of the Milky Way via UV studies. She took some short postdoc positions in Bochum and the MPIA in Heidelberg, and then went to the Osservatorio Astronomico di Padua, Italy. In 2001, she started as an ESO fellow on La Silla, and in 2005 got her current staff position on Paranal. By now, she is mainly working on compact binaries, like CVs, Pre-CVs, and a bit on microquasars. Also, she still does some work on Galactic structure and stellar populations.

Frederic Schuller has joined ESO in August 2011, as head of science operations at APEX. He received his PhD from the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris in 2002. His PhD work was focussed on the analysis of recent high-mass star formation in our Galaxy based on the ISOGAL infrared survey of the Galactic plane. Then, he moved to the Max-Planck-Insitut fuer Radioastronomie in Bonn, where he got involved in the very early stages of the APEX project. In particular, he played a crucial role in the development of the BoA (Bolometer array data Analysis) software, and in the commissioning of the Large APEX Bolometer Camera (LABOCA). Frederic is also the PI of the ATLASGAL (APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy) project, that produced the so-far largest map of the Galactic plane at sub-millimeter wavelength, covering more than 400 square degrees at 870 micron. His main scientific interests are on high-mass star formation.

Fernando Selman's current observational research interests include studies of the nature of the stellar IMF in several systems, and the dynamics and binary content in 30 Doradus using SINFONI. He recently found, together with his collaborators, that the IMF of the field stellar population in 30 Doradus is, within errors, consistent with a Salpeter law. In a recent project on the Arches cluster we reached a similar conclusion thus giving strong support to the hypothesis of universality of the IMF.  On a larger scale he is interested in the intergalactic light in clusters of galaxies. In the course of this research discovered with his collaborators an interesting S-shaped gravitational arc, an image of which can be seen in his personal web page. On a theoretical side he is interested in the dynamics of gravitational systems with particular attention to the phenomenon of dynamical friction. He is currently involved in an n-body simulation study of the stability of star clusters as a function of the mass of its heaviest star.
As an observatory astronomer, he has been instrument scientist for the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at La Silla, and he is currently at Paranal as instrument scientist for HAWK-I, VIMOS, and OmegaCam. Part of his technical work include the development of techniques that permit the determination of zero point correction maps in imaging instruments.
He started his career as a physics student at the School of Engineering of Universidad de Chile subsequently obtaining his PhD at Caltech in 2004. During his strongly acausal career he was Fulbright Travel fellow, Carnegie-Chile Fellow, and Beatrice Watson Parrent postdoctoral fellow.

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Alain Smette is a VLT operations Staff Astronomer. Following studentships at ESO-Garching and La Silla, he received his PhD from the Universite de Liege, Belgium, in 1994. He was a Post-Doc at Kapteyn Institute, Groningen, and a research associate first at the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, in the STIS team, then back in Liege. His research interests mainly include the study of absorption lines in the spectra of quasars and gamma-ray burst optical afterglows, gravitational lensing and AGN. He is the instrument scientist of CRIRES.

Jonathan Smoker
(PAO/SCV)

Jonathan Smoker is a VLT Operations Staff Astronomer and the instrument scientist for CRIRES (previously FLAMES and UVES). He obtained his PhD from Manchester University (Jodrell Bank), England in 1993 studying low surface brightness dwarf galaxies in HI and the optical, before moving on to be a computer systems administrator at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and IoA, Cambridge. After that came a 4-year stint as a postdoc at Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland, then 3 years at ESO Chile which he left in 2005. He is now back at the VLT, working on high velocity clouds, tiny-scale structure in the interstellar medium, the Magellanic system and some work on supernovae, B-type and Post-AGB stars.

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Stan Stefl is the Operation astronomer at VLTI and UT2 and the second AMBER instrument scientist. He obtained his PhD at the Charles University, Prague in 1987. After his associate stay at ESO-Garching in 1991-3, he was involved in many spectroscopic projects carried out mostly at the ESO La Silla observatory and focused on rapid variability of Be stars, structure and evolution of their circumstellar disks. He joined ESO-Paranal in 2004. His present research focuses on interferometric and spectroscopic observations of the circumstellar disks of Be stars and their consistent modeling.

Michael Sterzik received his PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Tuebingen (Germany), and was researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics in Munich. He has been working for science operations in La Silla and Paranal since joining ESO in 1998. His research interests focus on star- and planetary system formation, stellar dynamics, and bioastronomy, employing both observational and numerical approaches.

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Thomas Szeifert is support astronomer at the VLT since 1999. Before he was working for the FORS instrument consortium at the observatory in Heidelberg. He has been instrument scientist at Paranal for the FORS optical multi-mode instrument and the SINFONI near-IR adaptive optics integral field spectrograph. His primary fields of research are the study of long-term wind variability of Luminous Blue Variables and other massive hot stars and stellar abundance studies in the Galaxy and local group galaxies. He obtained his PhD in 1995 at the Heidelberg University for his work on Luminous Blue Variable Stars in the Magellanic clouds, M31 and M33.

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Massimo Tarenghi
(SCV)

Massimo Tarenghi  is the  ESO Representative in Chile. He became an ESO fellow in 1977 and has been an International Staff Member of ESO since 1979. He was the Project Manager of the ESO New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile between 1973 and 1991, becoming  Head of Coordination and Control for the Very Large Telescope in 1988. In the period of 1985 to 1988 he was full professor of astrophysics at the University of Milano. Appointed VLT Programme Scientist in January 1991, he became VLT  Programme Manager/Head of VLT Division in November of  that year. In addition, from January 1996 until October 1999 he was Director of  Paranal Observatory. On June 2002 he became the ALMA Interim Project Manager.  Since April 2003 until April 2008 he was the ALMA Director. He is member of the Academy of Science of Lincei. He was nominated Commendatore della Repubblica Italiana and in 2006, he received the "Premio Internazionale Barsanti e Matteucci" . His scientific interests include clusters of galaxies, large scale distribution, and active nuclei.

Michael West
(SCV)

Michael West is Head of the Office for Science in Chile. He received his PhD in astronomy from Yale University in 1987.  Prior to joining ESO he was Head of Science Operations at the Gemini South telescope and before that he spent seven years as Professor of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. His research interests include globular clusters, galaxy formation and evolution, clusters of galaxies at low and high redshifts, and the large-scale structure of the universe.  He is also active in public outreach.

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Tommy Wiklind joined ESO in 2010 as a member of the ALMA Department of Science Operations. He received his PhD from Chalmers University, Sweden in 1990. Prior to joining ESO, Tommy worked as Associate Professor at Chalmers/Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden. He also spent 8 years as an ESA Astronomer stationed in Baltimore, USA. While in Baltimore, Tommy was a member of the NICMOS Team. He has a background in mm/submm radioastronomy as well as optical/NIR. His main research interest today is on observational cosmology and galaxy formation & evolution. He uses multiwavelength data, ranging from mm to UV, to study the properties of distant galaxies.

Alvaro Alvarez
(PAO/SCV)

Manuel Aravena
(ALMA OSF/SCV)

Amelia Bayo
(PAO/SCV)

Amelia Bayo did her PhD at the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Fundamental Physics (LAEFF, Madrid). During her thesis she worked on low mass star formation (very low mass and brown dwarfs). She is a specialist on spectroscopic data, both in the optical and the near infrared and with a wide range of resolutions. She obtained her PhD degree in September 2009 and from November 2009 she is an ESO fellow with duties at Paranal.

Gabriel Brammer
(PAO/SCV)

Gabriel Brammer is an ESO Fellow with duties in Paranal Observatory since September 2010.  Prior to graduate school, he spent two years as a Data Analyst at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD.  He completed his PhD at Yale University in New Haven, CT in June 2010.  His research is focused on the evolution of massive galaxies at z>1, studied primarily using deep near-infrared surveys.

Caroline Foster
(PAO/SCV)

Caroline Foster is an ESO Fellow with duties in Paranal Observatory. She obtained her PhD in astronomy from Swinburne University in Melbourne in 2011. Her research interests include abundances and kinematics of nearby galaxies and their globular clusters. She is also interested in gas-phase metallicities and the evolution of the mass-metallicity relationship of star forming galaxies.

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Dimitri Gadotti
(PAO/SCV)

Dimitri Gadotti is an ESO fellow since October 2009. He has duties on Cerro Paranal and loves to work on the mountain! Dimitri obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2004, with a thesis on the formation and evolution of stellar bars in galaxies, using both spectroscopic and photometric data in optical and near-infrared passbands, as well as N-body simulations and analytical calculations. After his Ph.D. he spent 5 years in Europe at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. His works focus on bulges of disc galaxies, barred galaxies, dwarf galaxies, supermassive black holes and AGN activity, comparing measurements of the dynamics and structure of stellar systems to theoretical models, and thus trying to understand how such systems came to be. He is author of the BUDDA code, a public available software to perform detailed structural analysis of galaxies.

Sylvain Guieu
(PAO/SCV)

David Jones is an ESO Fellow with duties at the Paranal Observatory. Before joining ESO in March 2011, David studied for a PhD at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Manchester, UK. He also spent a year of his PhD working as a Support Astronomer for the Isaac Newton Telescope on the Spanish island of La Palma. His research is primarily focused on the formation and evolution of planetary nebulae, particularly the role played by binary stars.

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Petr Kabath
(PAO/SCV)

Petr Kabath obtained his PhD degree from Technical University Berlin and German Aerospace Center (DLR) where he worked on the CoRoT and BEST projects. He joined ESO in October 2009 and currently he is a Fellow astronomer at Paranal Observatory supporting instruments at UT4. His scientific work is focused on detection and characterization of extrasolar planets with photometric and spectroscopic methods. In addition, he is interested in physics of variable stars.

Gianluca Lombardi
(PAO/SCV)

Gianluca Lombardi got his master degree at University of Padova dedicating his first research in Multi-conjugated Adaptive Optics. During PhD studies he shifted to astronomical Site Surveys, in particular for what concerns the analysis of the astroclimate and the atmospheric turbulence profiles. Currently, he is supervising the E-ELT site testing campaigns in Northern Chile and Argentina.

Sergio Martin
(ALMA OSF/SCV)

Sergio Martin is an ESO fellow dedicated to ALMA. He carried out his PhD thesis at the IRAM 30m telescope in Spain, his home country, and received his PhD in 2006 at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He then moved to Cambridge, MA to join the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a Submillimeter Array Fellow.  He joined ESO in Nov. 2009. His main research interest is the chemical composition and differentiation in the nuclei of galaxies and the Galactic Center. He is also interested in
automatic molecular line identification and modelling.

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Andrea Mehner
(PAO/SCV)

Andrea Mehner is an ESO Fellow with duties at Paranal since September 2011. She obtained her PhD at the University of Minnesota investigating spectroscopic changes in eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars in our Galaxy. Her scientific interests lie in the different phases of evolved very massive stars.

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Guillaume Montagnier is an ESO fellow with duties in Paranal Observatory since January 2009. He completed his PhD in Astronomy at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (LAOG, Grenoble, France) and at Geneva Observatory (Switzerland). His main research interest is the search for very low mass companions (red dwarfs, brown dwarfs... plantets?) to dwarf stars of the solar neighborhood with high imaging techniques. He is also involved in the scientific preparation of the second generation instrument for high contrast imaging at the VLT: SPHERE. At Paranal, he is a support astronomer on theVLTI and on UT4.

Fabien Patru is an ESO fellow with duties in Paranal Observatory, mainly on the VLTI. He completed his PhD at the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur (OCA, Grasse, France), and spent a year at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (LAOG, Grenoble, France) before joining ESO in 2009. His main research interest is focussed on stellar physics by using interferometry techniques. He is involved on AMBER programs to study the stellar surface structures of red giants and the circumstellar environment of miras and cepheids. He also studies the direct imaging capabilities of future large arrays of telescopes using the hypertelescope concept.

Magaretha Pretorius
(PAO/SCV)

Myriam A. Rodrigues
(PAO/SCV)

Irina Yegorova
(PAO/SCV)

Irina Yegorova is a post-doctoral research fellow at ESO, with duty station in Santiago/Chile and at the Paranal Observatory. She received her degree in Physics from the Odessa State University. And in 2007 Irina obtained her PhD from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS, Italy). Her research interests are focused on galaxies structure, formation and evolution. In particular, on the distribution of dark and luminous matter and their effects on the process of galaxy formation.

Andrea Ahumada

Margaret Moerchen

Francisco Montenegro
(APEX/SCV)

Rodrigo Parra
(APEX/SCV)

Daniela Barria

Daniela Barria is a PhD student at ESO since March 2011, working under the supervision of Linda Schmidtobreick. She graduated in 2006 from the Universidad Catolica del Norte in Antofagasta (Chile) working with Nikolaus Vogt about the changes in superhumps periods for SU UMa dwarf novae. She is doing her PhD at Universidad de Concepcion with Ronald Mennickent as advisor studying the photometric long variability in an interesting type of close binaries named Double Periodic Variables. She is interested in Variable Stars, Close Binaries, and CVs.

Mauricio Carrasco

Mauricio Carrasco is a PhD student at ESO in Chile since February 2010. He comes from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC), where he studied Astronomy and he started his PhD. He works under the supervision of Michael West at ESO and Felipe Barrientos at the PUC. His research topic is the galaxy clusters at high redshift. He is studying the gravitational lensing in galaxy clusters and environment of QSOs pairs at high redshift.

Florian Gourgeot

Florian Gourgeot is a PhD student at ESO Chile since January 2011. He graduated in astrophysics from the University of Paris XI (France) with a planetary science formation. He is interested about the origin of our Solar System which can find answers in the study of the most primitive objects. His research topics cover visible and near-infrared observations of small icy bodies (satellites of the outer planets and trans-Neptunian objects). He is supported by his supervisors Christophe Dumas, Alvaro Alvarez and Antonella Barucci (France, LESIA).

Matias Jones

Matias Jones joined the Master program in 2006, at Universidad de Chile. He worked on Type II Supernova, as extragalactic distance indicators during his Master thesis. He started his PhD thesis on 2009, studying the impact of the post-main sequence evolution of the host stars on the presence of short period planets. He is currently working on his PhD thesis at ESO Vitacura.
Scientific interests: Exoplanets, chemical abundances, stellar evolution, supernova.

Taehyun Kim

Taehyun Kim is a PhD student at ESO, Chile, since November 2011. She studied on the formation of early type galaxies in nearby galaxy clusters and with this topic she received her master degree from Seoul National University in Korea. She also studied on the tidal debris of the early type galaxies using the data from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G). With Dimitri Gadotti as her local supervisor at ESO, Kartik Sheth at NRAO and Myung Gyoon Lee at Seoul National University, she will be working on her PhD thesis about the structural properties of the barred galaxies to understand the formation and evolution of barred galaxies.

Stefan Lieder

Stefan Lieder is a PhD student at ESO/Santiago since March 2011. After he obtained a diploma in Mechanical Engineering in 2004, he studied Physics at the universities of Karlsruhe and Heidelberg in Germany where he graduated in 2010. His diploma thesis was about dwarf galaxies in the Virgo cluster core. Since 2010 Stefan is working on his PhD thesis about star clusters and dwarf galaxies in groups and clusters of galaxies. While his supervisor at his home university in Heidelberg is Dr. Thorsten Lisker, at ESO he is under the supervision of Dr. Steffen Mieske and Dr. Ruben Sanchez Janssen and Dr. Michael Hilker (Garching). Stefan's main interests are galaxy formation and evolution as well as the linking between dwarf galaxies and star clusters.

Guillermo Manjarrez

Guillermo Manjarrez is a PhD student at ESO Chile since October 2011. He received his master degree at UNAM (Mexico) in 2008. His master thesis was about single dish and  interferometric observations of the starless dense core L1517B. He is working  under supervision of Dr. Itziar de Gregorio (Santiago) and Dr. Jose Francisco Gomez (IAA, Granada, Spain).  He is interested in  molecular clouds, bipolar outflows and low mass star formation.

Christoph Saulder

Joachim Vanderbeke