Jean-Philippe Berger
(PAO/SCV)

Scientific interests:

• Star and planetary formation
• Optical aperture synthesis
• High angular resolution instrumentation

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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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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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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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 support astronomer at Cerro Paranal observatory, currently deputy of the Head of the Science Operations Department and leader of the general operations groups. He has been the instrument scientist responsible for UVES, the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the VLT.
He started his career at ESO La Silla in 1995 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 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 emitters at high redshift, and the host galaxies of Gamma-Ray Bursts.

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).

Andreas Lundgren is the team leader of the science operations group at APEX. He received his PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics at the Stockholm University in 2004. During a sabbatical year he worked as support astronomer at the SEST (2002-2003) and in 2004 he moved to Chile to start as fellow at APEX. Since 2006 he has been working as paid associate, and since 2008 he is a staff astronomer. His scientific interests range from molecular line emission from nearby carbon stars to dust emission from distant galaxies, but the main focus is kinematics and physical properties of the interstellar medium in nearby galaxies, in particular barred spiral galaxy M83.

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.

Elena Mason
(PAO/SCV)

After having received the master degree in Astronomy at the historical University of Padova, Elena Mason first moved to the desolated and frozen lands of Wyoming and then to the arid and unbearable hot Tucson to get her PhD. She finally added the driest place in the world (the Atacama desert) to her "living in the desert experience" becoming part of the PSO team. She has been an ESO fellow between 2001 and 2004, and became an ESO staff astronomer in June 2004. Since 2005 she is responsible of the old glorious ISAAC which, despite all, is still capable of producing highly competitive data (e.g. Messenger 126, p.24). However, before the end of 2007 she will move to the second generation VLT instrument X-shooter: the first medium resolution spectrograph in Paranal and the dream of all SED seekers. Elena Mason started her career studying Classical Novae in outburst and short orbital period Cataclysmic Variables. Since then she believes that spectroscopy is a must and time resolution is the fun. Current interests include anything which is interacting, variable, bursting and/or requires challengingly fast observations.

Gautier Mathys is Head of the Visiting Astronomers Department; he shares his time between the ESO Headquarters in Garching and the ESO Science Office in Vitacura. 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. 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 works as a Commisioning Scientist in the ALMA project. He received his PhD from the University of Bonn suing 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.

Jorge Melnick
(SCV/GAR)

Scientific interests:

• Violent star formation
• Galactic and extragalactic starbursts
• Evolution of massive stars

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 environments and optical interferometry. In 2008, he joined ESO as an astronomer, mainly to work on the operation and the development of the VLTI. He currently acts as AMBER 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 supports science operations of the wide-field imagers, especially the survey telescope VISTA. 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.

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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Pere Planesas joined ESO on March 1st 2008 as ALMA Test Scientist. In 1981 he joined the Yebes Observatory (Spain) to participate in the start-up of a 14m millimeter-wave telescope. After receiving his PhD, he moved to Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory, specializing in millimeter-wave interferometry and the study of the molecular gas in galaxies. Back at the National Astronomical Observatory of Spain, he was a regular user of the IRAM telescopes and collaborated in the commissioning and testing of new instruments and software. In 1998 he became involved in the development of the HIFI instrument for the Herschel Space Observatory, and in the period 2002-2007 he lead the Spanish contribution to HIFI hardware and actively promoted the participation of Spanish astronomers in its scientific programs. His current research focuses in the study of molecular gas in luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies.

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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David Rabanus worked in the development of the GREAT receiver, a collaboration between the Kölner Observatorium für Sub-Millimeter-Astronomie (KOSMA http://www.ph1.uni-koeln.de), the Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) and the Institute for Space Sensor Technology of the German Aerospace Center (DLR-WS) on a heterodyne receiver of SOFIA within the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 494). Development of the 1.6-1.9 THz channel, local oscillator structural development, airworthiness certification of essential parts of the instrument structure. Design of the STAR receiver, a second generation instrument for SOFIA, following up on the experience with GREAT. Here emphasis on the Gaussian optics focal plane modules. Ground-based receiver deployment of the SMART receiver and servicing at the KOSMA telescope on Gornergrat, Switzerland. Deployment of the receiver CONDOR (1.3-1.5 THz) at the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX). Development and deployment of a 490/810 GHz dual frequency receiver for the NANTEN2 telescope, Pampa La Bola, Atacama, Chile, photogrammetry of the the NANTEN2 submillimeter dish. Application of new THz quantum cascade lasers as local oscillators for heterodyne observations on SOFIA.
Dissertation in the Institute for Space Sensor Technology and of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin-Adlershof. Topic: ‚Development of a Modular Stressed-Ge:Ga Photoconductor Focal Plane Array Prototype‘. This is a far-infrared photoconductor array was developed for deployment on the US-German Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) and forms the long-wavelength detector system in the spectrometer 'AIRES‘ based at the NASA Ames Research Center, California, in the US.

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.

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.

Personal web site: http://www.sc.eso.org/~fselman

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 FLAMES. 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, Magellanic system and some work on Post-AGB stars and precursors to supernovae.

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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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Alvaro Alvarez
(PAO/SCV)

Andrea Ahumada
(PAO/SCV)

Since April 2008, Andrea Veronica Ahumada is an ESO Fellow with duties on the VLT at the Paranal Observatory. She received her PhD in Astronomy from the “Universidad Nacional de Cordoba” (UNC, Argentina) in 2004. She was an assistant professor at the Astronomical Observatory (OAC-UNC) and since 2006 she is a member of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). Her main topics of research are Galactic Open Clusters and Magellanic Clouds Star Clusters.

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.

Yuri Beletsky is an ESO fellow with duty station at the Paranal Observatory where he supports the near-infrared imager and spectrograph ISAAC. He did his PhD at the University of Munich. His main research interests are related to study of extragalactic giant molecular clouds, diffuse interstellar bands and chemistry of interstellar medium. 

Thomas Bensby
(PAO/SCV)

Thomas Bensby is an ESO fellow with duties on the VLT at the Paranal Observatory. After obtaining a PhD at Lund University in Sweden in 2004, and before coming to ESO in 2007, he spent three years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA. His research focus on the origin and evolution of stellar populations kinematical structures in the Milky Way, in particular the Galactic thin and thick disks and the Hercules stream.

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Itziar de Gregorio-Monsalvo did her PhD at the National Institute for Aerospace Technology (Spain). During her thesis, she worked on Star Formation, Evolved objects and AGNs, and 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. She is a specialist on single-dish and interferometric techniques in Radio Astronomy with duties at APEX (as support astronomer) and ALMA (ATF in New Mexico, and OSF in Chajnantor). Her current scientific interests include low- and high-mass star formation processes, protoplanetary disks, astrophysical masers, and extragalactic Radio Astronomy.

Andrew Fox received his MSci in astrophysics from UCL in London in 2000. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin in the US where he obtained his PhD, working with FUSE and HST/STIS to study highly ionized gas in the vicinity of the Milky Way. He spent almost two years as a post-doc at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris studying VLT/UVES quasar absorption line data, before moving to ESO as a Fellow in October 2007, with duty station at Paranal. He is interested in the observational signatures of galactic winds, intergalactic metal enrichment, and determining the properties of the ionized halos of 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.

Diego Garcia did his Degree, Masters and PhD at Cardiff University in Wales, working on blind, HI surveys and the properties of HI-selected galaxies. His research interests lie on the properties of LSB and gas-giant galaxies and nearby galaxies in general. Prior to coming to ESO he did a two year postdoc at the Radioastronomy Institute of the University of Bonn where he worked on APEX. His current involvement is with ALMA and APEX and in particular he is interested in the dust and molecular content of nearby galaxies.

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.

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.

Margaret Moerchen joined ESO as a postdoctoral research fellow (duty station Paranal) in October 2008 after completing her PhD at the University of Florida.  Her primary research interest is in the formation and evolution of planetary systems, including our own solar system.  Her work employs mid-IR instrumentation at large ground-based telescopes to reveal the structure and composition of circumstellar debris disks produced by planetesimal collisions and sublimation.  She is also involved in the development of new mid-IR instrumentation, at present as a member of the instrument and science teams for CanariCam, which is one of the first-light instruments at the 10-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) on La Palma.

Personal home page

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.

Scientific interests:

• Interferometric instrumentation
• Direct imaging - Hypertelescope
• Stellar Physics

Magaretha Pretorius
(PAO/SCV)

Elena Valenti received her Master degree in Astronomy at the Bologna University with a thesis on "Searching RR Lyrae stars in the Globular clusters NGC 6304" under the supervision of Prof. C. Cacciari and Dr. M. Bellazzini. She did her PhD. in Astronomy at the Bologna University with a thesis "An IR screening of the Galactic bulge stellar populations" under the supervision of Prof. F.R. Ferraro and Dr. L. Origlia. She has been an ESO Fellow since October 2006 with duty at Paranal where she supports CRIRES. Her scientific interests are in the areas of stellar evolution and resolved stellar populations using high-resolution IR spectroscopy and space- and ground-based UV-optical-IR photometry (especially in crowded fields). Her ongoing projects include study of the formation and evolution time-scales of stellar populations in the Galactic Bulge and Bar, testing and calibration of stellar evolution models in the high metallicity regime, and hot stellar populations in globular clusters.

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.

MPIA, Heidelberg

University of Edinburgh, UK

Colin Snodgrass

MPI, Katlenburg-Lindau

Gianluca Lombardi
(LSO/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.

Paul Lynam
(PAO/SCV)

Francisco Montenegro
(APEX/SCV)

Rodrigo Parra
(APEX/SCV)

Karla Alamo obtained her bachelor's degree from University of Guanajuato (Mexico) and her thesis was about kinematics of BCGs in Abell clusters. In 2007, she began her graduate studies in UNAM, and last May she obtained her master's degree. Her PhD is about studying the BCGs through their GC systems. She is interested in the formation and evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Pedro Almeida

Pedro Viana Almeida is a PhD student at ESO, Chile. He received his degree and Masters (2007) from the Universidade do Porto (Portugal). His Master's thesis research was carried out at the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP), where he studied spectroscopically the fundamental atmospheric parameters of T-Tauri stars. His current research interests are in star formation, young stellar multiplicity, fundamental stellar parameters in the pre-main sequence phase of evolution, the formation and evolution of planetary systems and the chemical evolution of the Galaxy.

Daniel Asmus

Daniel Asmus is a PhD. student at ESO in Chile since January 2009. He comes from northern Germany where he achieved his diploma at the University of Kiel. While his diploma thesis about the inner region of accretion disks was of purely theoretical and numerical nature, his current thesis work focuses on the mid-infrared observation of dusty tori of low luminosity active galactic nuclei in our galactic neighborhood. He is supported by his supervisors Alain Smette in Chile and Wolfgang J. Duschl in Kiel.

Mauricio Carrasco

Scientific interests:

• Galaxy clusters
• Gravitational lensing in galaxy clusters
• Environment of QSOs pairs at high redshift

Holger Drass

Scientific interests:

• The pointing model for the Hexapool Telescope
• Near infrared imaging of AGN
• Star formation

Alexandre Gallenne is a PhD student at ESO in Santiago.  He comes from Paris, where he studied physics at Pierre and Marie Curie University. He works under the local supervision of Antoine Mérand at ESO and Pierre Kervella at the Observatoire de Paris.  His research topic is the survey of circumstellar envelopes around Cepheids stars using interferometric techniques mainly and possibly spectroscopic measurements.

Scientific interests:

• Galactic Structure
• Dynamics and kinematics of galaxies

Scientific interests:

• Star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds
• Stellar abundances
• Chemical evolution of galaxies

Jan Ruppert

Mónica Zorotovic

Mónica Zorotovic is a Chilean PhD student at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC) since march 2006. She works in evolution of close binaries, focused on the common envelope evolution, under the supervision of Marcio Catelan (PUC) and Matthias Schreiber (Universidad de Valparaíso). Since October 2008 she is working at ESO under the supervision of Linda Schmidtobreick.