About me
Welcome to my personal webpage!
I am a Peruvian astrophysicist. I am interested in the physics of galaxies and black-holes in the early Universe.
In particular, my research is focused on understanding how galaxies and black holes were formed and how they grow and evolve across cosmic time to finally shape the Universe we live in.
I am currently a staff scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as scientific project manager for an ESA space mission. Until 2023, I held a research fellowship at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching/Munich, Germany. Early 2019 I completed my PhD at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands, where I was part of the submillimeter
galaxies group led by Prof. Jacqueline Hodge and the radio astronomy
group led by Prof. Huub Rottgering. Previously, I was part of the ENIGMA group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Germany), led by Prof. Joseph Hennawi (UCSB).
My research in a nutshell: Supermassive black holes are sthought to be hosted by every massive galaxy in the Universe, and their energy output has a crucial impact on the growth of galaxies and the build-up of structure in the Universe. The information travelling towards us from galaxies and their black holes is fascinating and complex. They emit light from all wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum, and even gravitational waves have been recently detected that originate in merging black-holes! Some questions I would like to answer are:
How do galaxies and their nuclear black-holes grow?
What are the main properties regulating the evolution of galaxies?
The approach of my research is thus multiwavelength, meaning that I use observations taken by telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum, including the low-frequency radio (LOFAR), sub-millimeter (ALMA), infra-red (Herschel/Spitzer/WISE), optical (HST), and X-rays (XMM/Chandra) frequencies.
I am particularly interested in the potential of new spectral windows, such as those opened by ALMA and LOFAR, to unveil paths of galaxy evolution.