I am a Hubble Space Telescope instrument scientist at the Space Telescope - European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) and an Associate Astronomer in the science faculty of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

On the duty side, I work on the slitless spectroscopy modes of the HST Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) providing user and calibration support. I'm also involved in the ground calibration planing of the slitless spectroscopy modes of Wide Field Camera 3. Furthermore, I'm working on a pilot study to automatically extract calibrated 1-dimensional spectra from HST-NICMOS slitless spectroscopy in preparation of a Hubble-Legacy-Archive (HLA).

In terms of astronomy I'm working mostly on the stellar populations and dynamics of early-type galaxies in the nearby universe. I'm a member of the SAURON collaboration which aims to characterize the dynamics and stellar populations of nearby early-type galaxies and bulges with a survey using the integral field unit SAURON on the WHT (4.2m, La Palma, Canary Islands). In general I'm interested in galaxy formation and evolution.

Publications

CV (last up-date: Jan 2007)

The Sauron project. Click here for a list of recent SAURON publications.

Some useful astro links