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. For the soon (May 2009) to be installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on HST I lead the calibration efforts for the slitless spectroscopy modes. Furthermore, I'm working on the semi-automatic extraction of calibrated 1-dimensional spectra from HST-NICMOS and ACS slitless spectroscopy observations for the 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 full member of the SAURON and ATLAS3D collaborations which aim to characterize the dynamics and stellar populations of nearby early-type galaxies and bulges with surveys 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