Science
My main scientific interests are the formation
and evolution of stars and star clusters, as well as the formation and evolution of galaxies - and the connection between these two.
Recently, I also became interested in Astrobiology and Exo-planets atmospheres.
Since a few years, I am concentrating on studying the existence and role of intermediate-mass black holes in the two above question.
Our group is mostly observationally driven, but performs more and more simulation on specialised hardware.
Six ('older') GRAPE boards [Details can be found on the grape pages] and a small ('newer') cluster of GPUs are available for dedicated N-body simulations.
The machines are currently used in our group on projects analysing the effects of intermediate-mass black holes on the kinematics of globular clusters.
I am also part of the MASSIV collaboration, aiming at tracing the mass assembly in galaxies since the earliest times.
I am involved on the Garching Campus in the
IMPRS Graduate School for Astrophysics,
and the Cluster of Excellence for Fundamental Physics
Origin and Structure of the Universe.
Between January 2007 and December 2009, I chaired the
ESO Astronomy Faculty (internal pages).
More details can also be found by scanning through my
list of publications
or
list of referred papers.
Or just contact me!
Teaching
As an adjunct professor (Privatdozent) at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, I have a (reduced) teaching load.
Current lectures/classes:
* Wintersemester 2010/2011: Astrophysical advanced seminar (P4.0.6)
* Sommersemester 2011: An Introduction to Astrobiology (P5.0.29)
* Wintersemester 2011/2012: Astrophysical advanced seminar (P4.0.6)
* Sommersemester 2012: An Introduction to Astrobiology (P5.0.29)
I am currently accepting students.
Please feel to contact me for Master or PhD thesis subjects.
The two areas of research I supervise currently are:
* Intermediate-mass Black Holes
* (Exo-) Planet/Moons atmospheres
You might also want to have a look at the list of PhD Thesis topics
On the project side
Since February 2008, I am supporting as Project Scientist the detailed design phase (B) of the
European Extremely Large
Telescope Project, the next European giant telescope which promises incredible scientific breakthroughs.
On the instrumentation side
Between March 2000 and January 2008, I was active as Instrument Scientist in the
Optical Instrument department, the Adaptive Optics department, and last in
the NIR instrumentation department.
I have acted as Instrument Scientist for the following instruments:
-
VIMOS, an optical multi-object and integral-field
spectrograph
-
SINFONI, an adaptive optics
assisted near-infrared integral-field spectrograph
,
-
HAWK-I, a near-infrared wide-field imager, and
-
KMOS, a near-infrared multi-object spectrograph
based on deployable integral-field units.
I am still actively promoting integral-field spectroscopy, until recently through the
Euro3D Research Training Network.
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