Gaia contributors - Gaia
Current active Gaia contributors
The Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) consists of around 450 scientists and engineers. Below a list of currently active Gaia contributors can be found. The list presents some of the Gaia DPAC and ESA Gaia members but should not be considered a complete representation of the entire consortium. Gaia DPAC members who wish to be featured on these pages can contact the Gaia Helpdesk.
Further below, a list of retired Gaia contributors can be found.
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European Space Astronomy Centre |
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Asier Abreu joined the Gaia Science Operations Centre Calibration Team in ESAC in January 2013, working predominantly on software development and First Look analysis support. Previously, Asier formed part of the Herschel data processing operations team at ESAC and he also worked on other ESA missions (GOCE and CRYOSAT-2) in the context of software development and testing. Asier obtained a Masters degree in Astrophysics from the University of La Laguna in Tenerife in 2002, after which he moved to Oxford (UK) to work as hardware integration and test engineer. In his free time, Asier likes trekking and reading. [Published: 01/02/2013] |
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Leuven University |
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Conny Aerts obtained her mathematics diploma from Antwerp University in 1988 and defended her PhD thesis in astrophysics at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1993. She was a postdoctoral fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research of Flanders from 1993 until 2001, performing numerous short stays abroad in Europe, Chile and the USA. She was appointed as lecturer (2001) and subsequently as full professor (2007) at Leuven University. Since 2004, she also occupies the Chair in Asteroseismology at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She was vice-president (2000-2003) and president (2003-2006) of Commission 27: Variable Stars of the International Astronomical Union. Until 2008, she was the supervisor of 30 Master and 10 PhD students. She teaches 5 astrophysics courses of each 6 ECTS per year. She presently leads a research team of 8 PhD students, 6 postdocs and 1 software engineer. Conny Aerts is married and mother of two children, born in 1994 and 1998. Conny's research expertise concerns stellar astrophysics with subjects stellar structure, stellar evolution, variable stars and asteroseismology. She is a member of several international expert committees and advisory bodies in Belgium, the Netherlands and at ESA. She is also Belgian co-Investigator of the CoRoT space mission. Her main interest in the Gaia mission is in the field of variable stars, as member of CU7: Variability Processing. She was appointed as Gaia Science Team member as photometry and data analysis scientist in 2007. In 2009 Conny joined the ESA Space Science Advisory Commitee (SSAC) and consequently resigned from the Gaia Science Team. Conny's homepage is here. [Published: 03/12/2007 | Updated: 30/01/2009] |
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Observatory of Rome / ASDC (Italy) |
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Giuseppe Altavilla completed his PhD at the Astronomy Department of the University of Padua (Italy) at the beginning of 2004. During his PhD he worked on a supernova search at intermediate redshift and on the absolute calibration of type Ia SNe. As a postdoc he moved to Barcelona (Spain) within the European RTN project "The Physics of Type Ia Supernova Explosions". He has been involved in the ESA mission Gaia since 2006, when he entered the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), joining the CU5 DU13 team at the Observatory of Bologna (Italy), in charge of building a suitable grid of spectrophotometric standard stars for the absolute calibration of the Gaia G-band and BP/RP photometric system. In 2017 he moved to the Observatory of Rome (Italy), joining the CU9 team at the ASI-Science Data Center (ASDC). ASDC hosts a copy of the Gaia intermediate data releases and will host the final catalogue too. He currently contributes to the ASDC effort aimed at developing access, data extraction, data mining tools to enable the astronomical community to handle and fully exploit the scientific potential of the Gaia catalogue. [Published: 21/07/2008, Updated: 10/03/2017] |
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Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Heidelberg |
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Martin Altmann joined the Gaia team in July 2007, working for the CU3 group in Heidelberg, led by Uli Bastian. His main responsibilities are the compilation of the Ecliptic Poles Catalogue, which will be used in the commissioning phase of Gaia, and the organisation of the Ground Based Optical Tracking (GBOT) Campaign which will take place during the whole active mission phase of Gaia. He is also one of the CU3 representatives of the Ground Based Observing Group (GBOG). He studied physics and astronomy at the University of Bonn, from where he graduated in 1997 and was awarded his PhD in 2002. From 2001-2003 he also held a position at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in the frame of the DIVA project. From 2003 to 2007 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago de Chile. Apart from Gaia, his main scientific interests are in Galactic astronomy, mainly, the older populations which allow the analysis of structure and formation of the Milky Way. Further interests are the late stages of low mass stars (horizontal branch stars), and galaxies at a whole. Having transformed his premier hobby (astronomy) into his job, Martin Altmann, enjoys photography (nature and architecture), travelling, medieval history, and many other things. [Published: 03/07/09] |
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Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, |
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Rene studied physics in Berlin, Manchester, and Heidelberg, where he graduated in 2009. In 2011, he finished his PhD about alignment effects of angular momenta of disc galaxies. He recently joined the CU8 team at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg (Germany). His primary task is to calibrate the algorithms for estimating stellar atmospheric parameters from BP/RP spectra. In particular, he tries to account for the mismatch of synthetic and real/observed spectra. Furthermore, Rene is interested in exoplanet detection, mass/luminosity functions of tiny samples of stars and galaxies, and statistical/scientific methodology in general. [Published: 10/01/2012] |
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University of Barcelona |
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Teresa Antoja joined Gaia in 2017 as part of CU9 group at the University of Barcelona. She is working on the validation of Gaia data, especially of radial velocities. She also belonged to the Gaia Archive Preparation (GAP, 2011-2013). From 2013 to 2016 Teresa worked at ESTEC where she held an ESA Fellowship in Space Science devoted to the preparation for the scientific exploitation of Gaia data. Her main research fields and interests are: - Disk kinematics, velocity distribution of the Solar Neighbourhood and surroundings, moving groups, dynamical streams [Published: 25/08/2017] |
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Observatoire de Paris-Meudon |
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Frédéric Arenou works at the Observatoire de Paris, Meudon. He was a member of the Gaia Science Team from 2001 until 2005, and during this period also led two of the working groups: devoted to double and multiple stars, and on-board object detection. Frédéric is active in the simulation activities and the on-board object detection studies. [Published: 07/07/2003 | Updated: 06/11/2006] |
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University of Geneva, Switzerland |
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Marc Audard (M. Sc Physics, University of Lausanne; PhD, ETHZ) works on star formation, with an emphasis on the observational properties of protoplanetary disks in young outbursting sources. After his PhD in 2002 at the Paul Scherrer Institut and ETH Zurich, he was postdoc and then Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University in New York City where he shifted his research field from stellar coronae to star formation from a multi-wavelength perspective. In 2006 he returned to Switzerland as Swiss National Science Professor at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva. Since 2012 he is Maître d'enseignement et de recherche, working on different projects, namely the ASTRO-H/Hitomi project until his demise in 2016, currently working since September 2016 for the Gaia mission in the Coordination Unit 7 on variability processing. His main responsibilities within CU7 is quality assurance, being also the documentalist for DPCG, MDB manager for CU7, and validation scientist. He is also active in other missions, such as SPICA, XRISM, and ATHENA. Since 2018 he is also Executive Secretary of the European Astronomical Society. [Published: 14/10/2019] |
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Observatoire de Paris-Meudon |
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Carine Babusiaux is a member of the Gaia Science Team since January 2006. Carine completed her PhD (in 2003) on "Photometric Studies of the Milky Way" at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, where she was also actively involved in the detailed simulations of the Gaia instrument response, and in the details of the on-board detection. Since 2001 she has been coordinating and managing the Gaia GIBIS simulator. GIBIS is a pixel-level simulator of the Gaia mission intended to simulate how the Gaia instruments will observe the sky, using realistic simulations of the astronomical sources and of the instrumental properties. It is a branch of the global Gaia Simulator (GaiaSimu) under development within Gaia Coordination Unit 2: Data Simulations, of which Carine is a deputy manager. [Published: 21/07/2003 | Updated: 06/11/2006] |
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Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, |
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Coryn Bailer-Jones leads the Coordination Unit 8 "Astrophysical Parameters" in the DPAC. Its purpose is to classify and estimate physical parameters for all the different types of objects which Gaia will observe. Coryn is a staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Hedelberg, where he leads a group of several postdocs and students developing statistical analysis and machine learning methods for Gaia, amongst other things. His scientific interests include stellar astrophysics, Galactic structure, Bayesian methods, and the impact of astronomical phenomena on Earth climate and biological evolution. Coryn's home page is here. [Published: 05/01/2004 | Updated: 18/05/2011] |
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Universitat de Barcelona (UB) |
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Lola Balaguer-Núñez joined Gaia on the summer of 2007 as the manager of the Barcelona team in charge of the 30-people team contracts & activities, applications & reports for Spanish Ministry & European funds, accountancy, organization of meetings & workshops, planning (funds, venues, people), documentation (reports, webpages). She is also involved in smaller projects related to Gaia like the Spanish network of science explotaition of Gaia (REG) and public outreach activities at the Departament of astronomy - UB (ServiAstro). She studied Theoretical Physics and Chinese at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and completed her PhD on astrophysics at the Universitat de Barcelona after a world wide tour of many years: one at the Beijing Language and Culture Institute, three at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory as the first foreign student of Astronomy in China, and some Marie Curie stays at the IoA in Cambridge. After returning to Spain she has worked as a translator, interpreter & teacher of Chinese in different universities, as a Physics lecturer at the Universitat de Barcelona and coordinating seminars and conferences at Casa Asia in Barcelona. Her research interests are related to astrometry and photometry of open clusters. Other interests include sailing, travelling, languages, literature and the Chinese history of science. [Published: 28/4/2011] |
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University of Leicester |
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Martin Barstow is Professor of Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of Leicester and, for his sins, currently Head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Martin has a long-standing interest in space instrumentation and the study of white dwarf stars, using a variety of space and ground-based facilities. His initial interest in high precision astrometry emerged through exploitation of the Hipparcos archive, using the accurate stellar distances to constrain the white dwarf mass-radius relation. The desire to measure accurate distances for many more white dwarfs and to obtain astrometric mass estimates for white dwarfs in binary systems is the main scientific reason for his interest in Gaia. Through his experience with space instrumentation and data processing Martin is leading the University of Leicester contribution to the UK Gaia data processing consortium, and expects (subject to UK funding) to be involved in the CCD calibration and characterisation elements of the CU5 coordination unit. [Published: 02/05/2006] |
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Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Heidelberg |
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Uli Bastian was staff astronomer at ARI, Heidelberg, where he co-authored the FK5, PPM, Hipparcos and Tycho star catalogues. He entered the Hipparcos project in 1983, when the preparations for the data treatment had just started. He mainly worked on the Tycho data reduction, but contributed to the Input Catalogue and the main-grid reductions as well. He was part of the Gaia community from its beginnings in 1992/3, and had worked full time for Gaia since 2002. He was a member of the Gaia Science Team (2003-2007) and of the DPAC Executive (2005-2016). Until his retirement in 2017 he was leading the preparations and execution of the `Core Processing' part of Gaia's data reduction. Since then he has remained active in the DPAC consortium, especially in the astrometric work for Gaia DR2 and DR3. Uli's scientific hobbies include variable stars, galactic structure, the popularisation of astronomy - and field research on butterflies. His most active non-scientific hobby is dancing, especially Argentine tango. [Published: 13/06/2005 - Updated: 30/01/2020] |
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European Space Astronomy Centre |
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I was born in a nice town on the Ligurian sea, Santa Margherita Ligure, near Genova, in 1966. I got my degree in astronomy in 1991 and my PhD in 1996, both at the Bologna University. I'm a researcher astronomer (staff) at INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna since 1997. My research is focused on stellar populations, globular clusters, dwarf galaxies and galaxy formation, mainly from an observational point of view. I started working for Gaia in late 2005, in CU5, and particularly on the absolute flux calibration of Gaia BP/RP spectra and G band photometry. [Published: 05/12/2008] |
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Institute of Astronomy, |
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Vasily Belokurov has a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, where he is developing a system of automatic object classification for massive astronomical surveys using neural network techniques. He worked on the detection of microlensing and supernova signals from the Gaia survey, as part of the scientific alerts working group, during his DPhil studies at Oxford. Vasily's home page is here. [Published: 30/06/2003] |
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Landessternwarte Heidelberg |
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Michael Biermann graduated from Astronomisches Rechen-Institut Heidelberg in 1997 with a study on statistical aspects of astrometry. In 2001 he was awarded his PhD based on a thesis on accretion disc theory. He then worked on various aspects of the (now cancelled) German DIVA project. Michael is now based at Landessternwarte Heidelberg and is a member of the Heidelberg group studying the Gaia Science First-Look task. [Published: 26/01/2004] |
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Royal Observatory of Belgium |
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Ronny Blomme obtained his PhD in 1990 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is a staff member of the Royal Observatory of Belgium since 1989. His main research interest is the stellar winds of massive stars. He observes these using both ground-based facilities (mainly radio telescopes) and space-borne ones. He studies how both small-scale and large-scale structure affect the stellar winds, and what happens when two of these winds collide in a binary system. He also uses hydrodynamics codes and develops radiative transfer codes to interpret the observed data. He is involved in the Gaia-ESO Survey, where he leads one of the working groups. Ronny's Gaia involvement started in 2006. He develops one of the codes to determine the radial velocity from the RVS spectra and tests the scientific validity of such codes. He also works on the astrophysical parameter determination of hot stars. Published: 01/02/2013 |
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European Space Astronomy Centre |
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Alex joined the Gaia project in 2007 after completing his PhD at Ecole des Mines de Paris. He worked at the Astronomisches Rechnen-Institut in the Center for Astronomy of Heidelberg University on sphere reconstruction methods, and collaborated with Lund Observatory to develop AgisLab and the conjugate gradient algorithm used in AGIS. In 2012, Alex went to Dresden University at the Lorhmann-Observatorium to study the impact of basic angle variations on the AGIS solution and to investigate some mitigation possibility such as VBAC. His research led him to construct and analyse a new family of pre-conditioners designed for global astrometry. In January 2015, Alex moved to the Gaia Science Operation Centre at ESAC in Madrid to support the AGIS team processing the incoming data and computing the first astrometric solutions. [Published: 10/07/2015] |
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Leiden Observatory |
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Anthony Brown obtained his PhD in Leiden on the topic of the stellar content and evolution of OB associations and subsequently worked on the analysis of the Hipparcos data for the Hyades cluster. He has spent time as a postdoc at the Instituto de Astronomia in Ensenada, Mexico, and at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. Since 2001 he is back in Leiden where he now holds a permanent position as a researcher. Anthony has been involved with Gaia since 1997, contributing first to the science case for the mission. His main contributions have been to the optimization of the photometric filter system (used in the Gaia designs up to 2006) as a member of the photometric and classification working groups. Since January 2006 he is member of the Gaia science team. He is also a member of the CU5 management team and within this coordination unit he is focused mainly on the development of the methods and algorithms for the processing of the dispersed images from BP/RP, and on the reconstruction of images from the white light data collected with the SM and AF CCDs. Anthony is also the Scientist in Charge for Leiden Observatory within the ELSA (European Leadership in Astrometry) programme. Anthony's home page is here. [Published: 08/09/2003 | Updated: 08/02/2007] |
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Department of Physics |
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Deborah Busonero completed her PhD in Physics with the thesis on "The Gaia astrometric measurement model: error budget and calibration issues", defended on 11 March, 2005, at the University of Siena (Italy). Her PhD supervisor is Dr. Mario Gai (INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino) and her PhD Tutor is Prof. Pier Simone Marrocchesi (University of Siena). Deborah's thesis is mostly focused on a detailed model of the electro-optical response of the Gaia payload, for the baseline and alternative configurations, with the goal of defining tools for realistic evaluation of the measurement performance and identifying appropriate calibration methods. In January 2002 Deborah became a core member of the On-ground and In-orbit Calibration working group. At present she is engaged in a collaboration with Prof. Mario Lattanzi and Dr. Mario Gai on "Modelling of the Gaia astrometric measurement and of the instrument calibration procedures". [Published: 26/09/2005] |
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Leiden Observatory |
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Giorgia Busso obtained her PhD at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel (Germany) in 2007 with a thesis about the hot subdwarf stars in the Galactic Bulge. She started to work on Gaia during her first PostDoc at the Observatory of Teramo in Italy. Now she is a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands, where she collaborates with Anthony Brown. Giorgia is a member of DU11 in CU5 and her work is focused mainly on the development of the methods and algorithms for the processing of the dispersed images from BP/RP. Her scientific interests are Horizontal Branch stars, globular clusters, Galactic bulge and UV excess in elliptical galaxies and bulge of spirals. [Published: 25/02/2010] |
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Lohrmann Observatory, Dresden |
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Alexey Butkevich is a member of Gaia CU3 (Core Processing) where he works on various aspects of the astrometric processing of the Gaia data mainly focusing on the velocity determination from Gaia's own observations. Space astrometry and its various applications have been his main interests in astronomy ever since 1995, when he joined the Struve space astrometry project in Pulkovo Observatory, Saint-Petersburg. There he led the scientific and programming implementation of the data reduction. Since 2006 Alexey has been working at the Lohrmann Observatory, Dresden, with Sergei Klioner. [Published: 19/11/2007] |
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INAF, Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna (Italy) |
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Carla Cacciari obtained her Degree in Physics at the University of Bologna. Her main scientific interests include Population II objects (e.g. globular clusters, RR Lyrae variables) and the structure of the Galactic halo. She spent some time at the MSSSO (Australia) and at the RGO (UK) studying the RR Lyrae variables and the phenomenon of mass loss from red giant stars in a few globular clusters. For several years she worked in Spain as an ESA fellow at the IUE project in VILSPA (Madrid), and in the USA as an ESA Resident Astronomer at the Hubble STScI in Baltimore. In those positions, she worked in the groups providing support and assistance to the observers, as well as continuing her own scientific research activity. She is presently Associate Astronomer at the Osservatorio Astronomico in Bologna. In Gaia, Carla has been a member of the CU5 Management Group since February 2006. The CU5 is in charge of the photometric data processing (see the CU5 wiki page) and Carla, along with Elena Pancino, is leading the group responsible of providing the absolute calibration of the G-band and BP/RP photometric system. [Published: 27/11/2006] |
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SRON (Utrecht) |
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Giacomo Cannizzaro is a PhD student at SRON in Utrecht (The Netherlands). The main subject of his research are Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs). He graduated in Physics and Astrophysics at the Sapienza University in Rome, Italy - where he was born - with a thesis on the study of magnetars. For Gaia he will assess the number of white dwarf TDEs that should be detected with Gaia. His scientific interests include compact objects and transient events. In his free time he enjoys mountain sports and reading. [Published: 22/02/2017] |
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University of Barcelona |
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Josep Manel Carrasco is a PhD Physics student at the University of Barcelona under the supervision of Carme Jordi. He is a core member of the Photometry Working Group (PWG) and is actively involved in the design and characterization of the Gaia photometric system. Josep Manel has worked on the production the photometry simulations (using the Photometry Working Group simulator that he maintains) to evaluate the many photometric systems that have been proposed, computing also the figure of merit used to analyze and quantify the advantages and drawbacks of the BBP and MBP bands. This has resulted in the recommendation by the Photometry Working Group of baseline BBP and MBP photometry systems for Gaia. To do this, he was previously involved in the definition of a set of Scientific Targets (STs) among the observable objects by Gaia - these STs are used to evaluate the behaviour of the photometry filters in determining the astrophysical parameters of the stars. The photometry simulator has also been used to produce the test grids needed by the Classification Working Group to improve their classification and parametrisation algorithms. Josep Manel's web page is here. [Published: 10/01/2005] |
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IMCCE, Observatoire de Paris and Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur |
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Benoit Carry is an assistant astronomer working at the Institute for Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeris Computation (IMCCE) of the Observatoire de Paris and the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur. His main scientific interests are the small bodies of our solar system, linked to planet formation and the evolution of planetary systems. Benoit joined CU4 in January 2013, working on the short term pipeline. He designed the tools (DU459) to disseminate call-for-observation alerts for newly discovered solar system objects by Gaia to a network of ground-based observers (called Gaia-FUN-SSO, organised by W. Thuillot). [Published: 03/07/2015] |
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Universitat de Barcelona |
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Javier Castañeda finished his Telecommunication Engineering at the UPC (Barcelona) on September 2004. His Master Thesis, advised by Enrique García-Berro and Jordi Portell, was focused on the non-idealities of the on-board clock of Gaia. He developed an excellent clock simulator for this, which reported the expected results for Rubidium-class atomic clocks. After two years working in the private sector, in November 2006 he rejoined the project as researcher at the University of Barcelona, in the IDT/IDU group. Since then, he has created and led IDA, IDV, TmTools, TMV and DpcbTools, actively collaborated in IDT development, and worked on the IDU design and development (including DPCB-related developments). He also co-advised with Jordi Portell a Master Thesis on the GIBIS-to-GASS converter. In the mean time, he achieved the Master Degree in Computational Astronomy on June 2008, where he implemented the Attitude-to-Healpix algorithm used in IDT SourceMatching and useful for many other algorithms. He is doing now the PhD thesis, advised by Jordi Torra and Claus Fabricius, on the scientific and technical developments required by IDU. When he is not busy with these many issues, Javier likes to climbing and canyoning. He is member of the Climbing Club of Catalonia (CEC) where he also holds an instructor role. Among other activities he likes painting, cooking, playing piano... [Published: 16/12/09] |
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INAF - Torino Astronomical Observatory |
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Alberto Cellino is a core member of the Solar System Working Group (SSWG), where he is responsible for the task of exploiting Gaia photometric data of asteroids for deriving information about spin rates and orientations, as well as overall shapes, of these objects. For these purposes, he has developed some algorithms, which are currently being tested by means of suitable simulations and applications to Hipparcos data. A graduate of the University of Torino, he is currently Astronomer at the INAF - Torino Astronomical Observatory. He is a well known expert on the physical properties of minor planets, particularly concerning the role played by collisions in the overall evolution of the asteroid population. Alberto is currently the Chairman of the Minor Planets Working Group of IAU Commission 15. [Published: 14/03/2005] |
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European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) |
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Neil Cheek recently joined the Gaia Science Operations Centre Team at ESAC in the role of Science Operations Engineer, where amongst other tasks he will assist with the definition of the SOC operations processes and procedures, including the execution of readiness tests and simulation campaigns. Neil has been working in an ESA operations environment for more that 16 years, at ESOC in Germany and ESAC in Spain for ISO (Infrared Observatory Mission) as part of the MOC Flight Control Team, and repeating the experience for XMM-Newton (X-ray Observatory Mission) but this time as part of the SOC Team. He also spent 3 years working with the Science Archives Team on the maintenance and development of the astronomy and planetary mission archives that are hosted at ESAC. In his spare time he enjoys Photography and is also the president of the ESAC Photoclub, on a more sporty note he also plays Padel, a popular Spanish raquet sport. [Published: 31/3/2011] |
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Universidad de Antofagasta, Unidad de Astronomia |
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My research interests are the dynamics and structure of galactic disks, from the Milky Way and Local Group to the nearby and intermediate redshift Universe. The typical questions I want to address are: How is mass distributed into stars, interstellar gas and dark matter in spiral or irregular galaxies? What are the scale parameters of dark matter haloes of galaxies? What are the relations between the baryonic luminous matter and the hidden mass? How do the gravitational potential of the luminous components impact that of dark matter? How did the luminous and dark matter evolve with redshift? Does the standard cosmological paradigm in which the mass of the Universe and galaxies is dominated by dark matter provides a better description of observations than alternate models of gravitation, like e.g. Modified Newtonian Dynamics? These fundamental questions are all related to understanding the evolution of galaxies. These objectives are achieved by observing the 'resolved' stellar populations and the atomic (neutral and ionized) and molecular gas in the galaxies, deriving important observables (velocity and velocity dispersion fields, rotation velocity curve, mass surface density), and modelling the gravitational potential and distribution of mass. I started working for DPAC in early 2010 until early 2015, then again since mid-2016, as a member of Coordination Unit 6. In particular, I am involved in ground-based observations and analysis of the reference sample of stars needed for the calibration of the RVS. The radial velocities of the stars observed from the ground have to be very stable with time to be part of the list of reference, standard stars that defines the zero-point of all radial velocities measured by RVS. I also make libraries of ground-based high-resolution spectra of stars to be used for validation of RVS spectra. These ground-based spectra are exclusively from Narval and Espadons, as these are the only spectrographs able to make routinely 'high-resolution spectra in the RVS wavelength range'. My interests in Gaia data are multiple. With data from the upcoming Gaia DR2, I will use Gaia astrometry and ground-based spectroscopy to try to infer the 3D velocity space of stellar populations in the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies. I’d also want to constrain the pattern speed of the Galactic bar and spiral arms, and perform mass models of the Milky Way. The ultimate goal is to compare the dynamical properties of the Milky Way with those from other massive spirals to replace it in a broader context, to be able to answer the persisting question: is the Milky Way unique, or is it typical of galaxies with similar chemical, dynamical and structural properties? [Published: 09/05/2017] |
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European Space Operations Centre |
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Peter Collins is the Power and Thermal operations engineer in the Gaia Flight Control Team at ESOC. He comes from Derbyshire in England, and graduated from the University of Manchester in 2002 with a Phyiscs with Astrophysics Masters degree. After graduation, Peter worked at EUMETSAT in Darmstadt, Germany, where he was a member of the Flight Control Team (FCT) for the MetOp-A mission, responsible for flight operations for several of the instruments on-board pre- and post-launch. From there, Peter moved to the Netherlands and joined the Herschel-Planck Project Team based at ESTEC. He spent an intensive year planning, preparing, and then helping execute the launch-and-early-orbit and commissioning phases for Herschel. Following another spell at EUMETSAT, Peter then joined the Gaia FCT in ESOC. He is currently responsible for flight operations preparation for Gaia, specifically for the power and thermal subsystems, but less specifically he is involved in general testing and preparation of the mission control facilities that will be used post-launch to monitor and control the spacecraft. During the spring-summer of 2012, he was also a member of the LEOP B-team for the MetOp-B mission, enjoying an exciting three days of operations following the launch in September. Outside of work, Peter is a keen football player and member of the ESOC football team. He is a big Manchester United FC fan. Peter also enjoys listening to music and attending music concerts. Published: 01/02/2013 |
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Observatoire de Paris-Meudon |
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Françoise Crifo works at Paris Observatory, Meudon, now as emeritus astronomer, within the CU6-RVS group. Her main contribution is the elaboration of the lists of candidate standard stars for the RVS calibration, on the whole sky and near the ecliptic poles. Before that, she worked since 1983 for the Hipparcos Input Catalogue consortium, mainly with Catherine Turon and Ana Gómez; she defined the so-called "Survey", and made the inclusion in the Hipparcos Catalogue of a good part of the "problem stars", at a time where digitised surveys did not exist. Published: 22/02/2013 |
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Mullard Space Science Laboratory, |
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Mark Cropper is at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UK, where he is leading the technical studies of the radial velocity spectrometer for Gaia, closely associated with the work of the radial velocity working group. He has been involved in many ground and space-based instrumentation programmes, including Gemini, Jet-X, Swift, and XMM-Newton. More information on MSSL's studies for the radial velocity spectrometer are available on the RVS web site. [Published: 28/07/2003] |
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Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur |
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Maria Teresa Crosta is a core member of the Relativity and Reference Frame Working Group (RRFWG) of Gaia. Her main activity is devoted to modelling the Gaia observations within the precepts of General Relativity and to estimating some relativistic effects which can appear in the data reduction process. She started to study these topics during her Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of Prof. F. de Felice (University of Padua) and in close collaboration with the Astrometric Group at the Observatory of Turin (in particular Mario Lattanzi and Alberto Vecchiato). Maria Teresa is currently Poincaré Fellow at the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, working with F. Mignard on the relation between TCB/time on-board, and on the assessment of the relativity experiment close to Jupiter's edge. [Published: 19/07/2004] |
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European Space Agency |
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Cian Crowley joined the Gaia Project Scientist's Support Team at ESTEC in November 2009. His role within the Gaia team deals with the analysis of data from various radiation tests on the spacecraft CCD detectors. This is performed with a view to determining the optimum Gaia operating strategy to minimise the effects of radiation damage on the detectors and also implementing a strategy for calibration in the on-ground data processing. Previously, Cian has worked predominantly on space-based observations of red giant and symbiotic binary stars. This work took place at Trinity College Dublin, where he obtained his PhD, and subsequently worked as a research fellow. [Published: 30/11/09] |
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ESAC (Madrid) |
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Héctor Cánovas is part of the Gaia SOC team at ESA/ESAC since January 1st, 2020, where he works as a calibration and archive support scientist. This combined position involves different duties, such as investigating the calibration of saturated sources and leading the development and implementation of several functionalities of the Gaia Archive. His job also involves manning the Gaia Helpdesk, presenting the Gaia Archive to the Scientific community, and gathering requirements from internal (DPAC, ESDC) and external users (Scientific Community). Héctor obtained his Physics degree in La Laguna University (Tenerife, Spain) in 2007. Afterwards he moved to Utrecht (The Netherlands), where he completed his Ph.D in 2011. His thesis was focused in the application of imaging polarimetry at optical wavelengths to image protoplanetary discs, the birth-sites of planets. In 2012 Héctor moved to Chile where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher analyzing interferometric observations acquired with ALMA and high contrast images of selected discs showing signposts of planet formation. In 2016 he moved back to Spain to work for the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. In 2017 Héctor was awarded with a Research Fellow position at ESA/ESAC, where he studied large populations of protoplanetary discs by analyzing Gaia measurements with Machine Learning algorithms. [Published: 02/06/2020] |
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University of Antwerp |
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Marc David received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Brussels in 1979 with a dissertation in the field of transmission electron microscopy. In 1985 he reoriented his research towards stellar dynamics, in particular the dynamics of star forming regions, with a special interest in the measurement of radial velocities of early-type stars. He joined the RVS working group in 2000 and is now a member of CU6-DU650 (the Single Transit Analysis team). [Published: 02/07/2013] |
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Institute of Astronomy, |
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Michael Davidson graduated in 2001 with a degree in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge. He then had the opportunity to undertake a PhD at the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh. The subject, searching for clusters of galaxies in archival XMM-Newton observations, provided plenty of experience in data analysis and astronomy pipeline development. A member of Gaia CU5 DU10 in Edinburgh since 2007, his work is primarily on the mitigation of the radiation-induced charge transfer inefficiency. This topic offers many challenges and involves contributions to several systems including IDT, First Look and IDU. Michael can often be found talking about, and occasionally flying, light aeroplanes. [Published: 21/03/2012] |
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Institute of Astronomy |
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Francesca De Angeli completed her PhD at the Astronomy Department of the University of Padova (Italy) at the end of 2004. During her PhD she worked on photometry and radial velocity data of Galactic globular clusters. She has been also developing a new technique to determine accurate distances and ages of globular clusters through axisymmetric modelling of their internal dynamics. Francesca is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge (UK). There she is collaborating with Floor van Leeuwen on the preparation of a software tool-box, aimed at providing basic algorithms for future shell and core tasks for the Gaia data analysis. She is also involved with the Simulation and Photometry working group activities. [Published: 28/02/2005] |
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European Space Agency |
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Jos de Bruijne works in the Science Division at ESTEC, in collaboration with the project scientist, on various system and payload aspects of Gaia. Since joining the Gaia team in October 2002, he has worked on, for example, the on-board timing requirements, on the on-board object detection, and on the astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopy accuracy models. He is also responsible for the contents maintenance of the Gaia Parameter Database and for the Gaia DR2 Primer. Since 2015, Jos is also active as Hipparcos liaison scientist - responsible for the Hipparcos archive, helpdesk, publication statistics, and website - and as performance scientist in the Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics (Athena) mission, due for launch in the early 2030s. For Athena, Jos' work involves monitoring and optimising mission performance, including effective area, background, environment (spacecraft orbit), and timing. [Published: 25/08/2003 | Updated: 02/10/2020] |
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Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Nice |
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Marco Delbo, a native of Novi Ligure (AL), Italy, is a researcher at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) at present on leave at the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in Nice, France, with an External Fellowship of the European Space Agency (ESA). Marco's current research activity is the study of the effects of non-gravitational forces and the presence of satellites on the high accuracy astrometric measurements that Gaia will obtain on asteroids. He has demonstrated the detectability, by Gaia, of the Yarkovsky effect for near-Earth asteroids. As a member of the Gaia DPAC (CU4 and CU2) he is working on the development and refinement of theoretical models to be used in Gaia data reduction. These models will allow the relevant physical parameters of asteroids to be derived from Gaia observations. Marco's scientific interests are mainly focused on solar system science and on the physical characterization of minor bodies by means of observations in the thermal infrared and polarimetry in visible light. He is coauthor of the largest size and albedo radiometric survey of near-Earth Asteroids (see Delbo, M. et al, 2003, Icarus, Volume 166, Issue 1, p. 116-130, and Delbo, 2004, The Nature of near-Earth asteroids from the study of their thermal infrared emission, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany). For the past few years he has also been working on the application of new techniques of high angular resolution (interferometry at the Very Large Telescope, and Gaia) to the size determination and the discovery of binary systems of asteroids. [Published: 19/03/2007] |
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Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge |
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Catrina Diener obtained her PhD at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in 2015 with work on high redshift environment and its impact on galaxy evolution. After that she moved to the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam (Germany) where she conducted research on Lyman-alpha emitters detected with the MUSE instrument. Work on Gaia started with the transition to the Institute of Astronomy (IoA) in Cambridge in 2016. Catrina is a member of CU5 and focusses on BP/RP spectra. Her scientific interests are probably as far from the Gaia project as possible and entail clustering in the high-redshift universe, proto-clusters and galaxy evolution. In a life outside science she enjoys music (in particular playing the piano and singing), climbing and reading. [Published: 01/02/2017] |
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Astrophysical Observatory of Torino |
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Ronald Drimmel is a research astronomer at the Turin Astrophysical Observatory - INAF, whose broad research interests are Galactic structure and dynamics, and the ISM. Ron has been involved in Gaia since 1997, initially as a contributor to the Simulation and Photometric Working Groups and, and since late 2005 as an active member of CU3 (Core Processing) and CU8 (Astrophysical Parameters). In the past Ron has contributed a Galactic extinction model for the CU2 Universe Model. He currently coordinates a CU8 work package "Interstellar Extinction", charged with advising the other CU8 tasks on the best way to parameterize extinction and for developing a SW module to produce a total Galactic extinction map. Ron is also on the Gaia Payload Experts group, responsible for monitoring and evaluating the performance of the Gaia instrument. [Published: 17/05/2004 | Updated 09/01/2015] |
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Institute of Astronomy |
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Dafydd Wyn Evans is part of the CASU group at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. After completing his PhD at the IoA, Dafydd joined the Royal Greenwich Observatory and worked on Hipparcos data reductions. During this period he was chairman of the Photometry Working Group. Since then he has worked on the Carlsberg Meridian Telescope, WFCAM and VISTA projects. Dafydd's initial Gaia interests were mainly focused on the Variable Stars Working Group of which he was the co-leader. He is currently Deputy Manager of CU7 (Variability Processing). He also works in CU5 (Photometric Processing) and has interests in CU2 (Data Simulations.) Dafydd's home page is here. [Published: 21/03/2005 | Updated: 29/05/2006] |
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Institute of Astronomy, |
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Wyn Evans' interests in Gaia began with his work in Oxford, where he made a number of studies related to the capabilities of Gaia for the detection of Solar System objects, including the Trojan satellites, helping the scientific case for Gaia in this area before the mission's selection in 2000. Since then he has worked on the first-look science alerts capabilities of Gaia, undertaking detailed studies, with his student Vasily Belokurov, of the detection of astrometric and photometric microlensing events with Gaia, and of supernovae (both works published in MNRAS 2002-03, see Library), and continuing his studies of the Solar System capabilities, including the detectability of comets. Now at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, the next steps of this work will be to figure how these objects can be distinguished in the Gaia data stream in practice, where links with the simulation and variability working groups will be needed. [Published: 12/01/2004] |
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Observatoire de Genève |
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Laurent Eyer obtained his PhD in 1998 at the Observatoire de Genève, Switzerland, working with Michel Grenon on the analysis of the variability data from Hipparcos, resulting in the Hipparcos Variability Annex and Light Curves (Volume 12 of the Hipparcos Catalogue). During his first postdoc, in the Catholic University of Leuven, he worked on exploiting Hipparcos findings on certain variable stars. A subsequent post-doctoral position at Princeton was focused on the analysis of the OGLE data, providing experience in the handling of massive data sets of direct relevance to Gaia. Following the award of a major grant by the Swiss Government in May 2003 for involvement in the Gaia mission, Laurent Eyer returned to Geneva, where he led the Variability Working Group (2003-2005) whose goals were to develop the algorithms necessary for the automatic detection and classification of variable stars for Gaia. As a member of the DACC (2006) Laurent was involved in preparations leading to the formation of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. Within the DPAC he is manager of CU7: Variability Processing. Laurent is involved with the European Leadership in Space Astrometry (ELSA) programme as the Scientist in Charge for Geneva Observatory and the Integral Science Data Centre. Laurent's home page is here. [Published: 08/12/2003 | Updated: 08/02/2007] |
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University of Barcelona |
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Claus Fabricius worked for many years at the University of Copenhagen, initially taking part in the Carlsberg Meridian Circle project on La Palma, and later participating in the construction of the Tycho-1 and Tycho-2 catalogues. In 2002 he joined the Gaia data analysis prototype (GDAAS), that was being developed by GMV (Madrid) and the University of Barcelona. Now based in Barcelona, he is involved in preparing the data analysis for Gaia, in particular in the aspects of the initial treatment of the observations, and in the calibration of the photometric data. [Published: 27/10/2003 | Updated: 11/09/2006] |
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University of Barcelona |
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Francesca Figueras works at the University of Barcelona, Spain. She is actively involved in GDAAS (Gaia Data Access and Analysis Study) Phase II, working at present on the implementation of the algorithms provided by the Gaia community. She also participates in several activities of the Simulation and Photometry Working Groups. [Published: 4/08/2003] |
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European Space Astronomy Centre |
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Emilio joined ESAC in July 2015 as Science Operations Engineer in the Science and Robotics Exploration Directorate, supporting the Gaia project. [Published: 15/09/2015] |
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Royal Observatory of Belgium |
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Yves Frémat obtained his PhD in 1999 at the University of Mons. His main scientific interests are related to the study of B-type emission line stars, of delta Scuti stars and of binary stars. He held a Marie Curie postdoc fellowship for 2 years at the Observatoire de Paris/Meudon (GEPI laboratory) and, from 2003 to 2006, was a postdoc at the Royal Observatory of Belgium where he obtained a staff position in 2007. Yves's involvement in the Gaia mission really started in 2005 as a core member of the RVS working group. Since 2006, he is a member of CU6 and CU8 and is presently contributing to the software development of the GWP-S-835 (Extended Stellar Parametrizer) and GWP-S-650 (Single Transit Analysis) work packages. [Published: 18/06/2007] |
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European Space Agency |
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As the current Gaia System & Mission Operations Manager, Robert Furnell is responsible for Gaia system engineering and mission operations. He continues to manage Gaia on-board software and the service module procurement. Robert joined the European Space Agency in 1998 following some years in Astrium UK working in radar electronics and simulation. Initially, as a contractor in ESOC, being part of the demanding ENVISAT spacecraft LEOP & operations control team, responsible for data handling & Software maintenance. He later became ESA staff and continued to support many missions at ESOC as system engineer & data handling/Software expert. Robert also contributed to ECSS standardisation, OBSW Maintenance & Simulator developments and other operations procurements during his time in Darmstadt (Germany). In 2006 Robert moved to ESTEC (Netherlands) to take up a position in the Gaia Project Team as Electrical & SW engineer. He quickly moved to become Section Head as Electrical Engineering & Software Procurement Manager in 2008. He has been the Gaia Service Module & Software Manager from summer 2010 to autumn 2012. [Published: 14/07/2011 | Updated: 11/10/2012] |
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Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), |
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Mario Gai works at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino. His interests in Gaia are primarily focused on the ground verification and in-orbit calibration, and he leads a scientific working group charged with developing these details, and following the associated industrial studies. [Published: 12/09/2005] |
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European Space Agency |
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As a Focal Plane Assembly (FPA) system engineer for Gaia, Philippe Garé is responsible for the procurement of the Gaia FPA from industry. Philippe joined the European Space Agency in 1993 initially working in the Earth Observation Programme (Envisat – Optical instruments). Since then he has been payload system engineer for Integral (Spectrometer Integral) and for Eddington before joining the Gaia team in 2004. He is the Gaia Payload Manager since summer 2009. [Published: 01/11/2010] |
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TU Dresden |
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Robin is a member Gaia Coordination Unit 3 (CU3; Core Processing) where he works on the detection of certain relativistic effects in the Gaia data. As a computer scientist with a specialisation in supercomputers, he is particularly interested in highly parallel algorithms which are suitable for the huge amounts of data that Gaia generates. During his studies of computer sciences at Technische Universtität Dresden (Germany) Robin was involved in astrometric observations of asteroids at the Lohrmann Observatory. He finished his diploma thesis about highly non-linear model fitting for Gaia data in early 2014 (the thesis was co-supervised by Sergei Klioner). Robin worked for one year in the local computing centre as a scientist before he joined the Gaia group at TU Dresden in May 2015. Astronomy, photography and hiking have been Robin's hobbies since his youth. He tries to combine these with travelling to the natural wonders around the globe whenever he can. [Published: 19/11/2015] |
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Institute of Astronomy, |
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Gerry Gilmore has been involved in Gaia for some years. He was a member of the science team during the study phase, and contributed to the science case in the formal proposal to ESA. Gerry presented the strategic case for Gaia approval at the ESA selection meeting. He is PI of VEGA, the consortium which leads UK-funded Gaia activities, and hopes to generate considerable support for photometric data reduction, and useful real-time scientific products during Gaia's operations. Gerry's scientific interests include Galaxy formation and evolution, and the distribution and nature of Dark Matter: both can be studied optimally with the precision astrometry, radial velocities, and photometry which Gaia will provide. He also leads OPTICON, the EC Coordination network for Optical and Infrared astronomy. Gerry's home page is here. [Published: 05/04/2004] |
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University of Ljubljana |
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Andreja Gomboc received her PhD from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2001 with the dissertation on simulations of tidal disruption of stars during a close encounter with a massive black hole in a galactic center. In 2002-2004 she was a Marie Curie postdoctoral Fellow at the Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool John Moores University, UK, where she was involved in the development of the automatic pipeline for identification of optical afterglows of Gamma Ray Bursts and their rapid follow-up observations with the 2-m robotic Liverpool Telescope on La Palma, Canaries. Her research interests include also rotational velocities of symbiotic stars. She is a core member of Gaia's Radial Velocity Spectrometer Working Group with her main interest on stellar rotational velocities as they will be determined from RVS spectra. Photo: Andreja with her daughter Tita [Published: 19/12/2005] |
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ESAC Science Data Centre |
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Juan Gonzalez is working for Gaia CU9 since 2012 as data engineer and database architect for the Gaia Archive at ESAC. Since DR1, he is also the technical contact point for coordinating Gaia activities within the ESAC Science Data Centre. His work is oriented towards maximising Gaia data accessibility to the scientific community. He obtained his MSc in Telecommunication Engineering in 2008, while completing a traineeship in the ESA Solar System Division. Afterwards he joined the ESA Science Archives Team as Software Engineer, where he has contributed to activities within the IVOA as developer for VOSpec and Euro-VO Registry and other archives such as the Planck Archive or the Planetary Science Archive. His current research interests include innovative techniques to bring analysis code to scientific archives and enabling the visualisation of scientific data in virtual reality platforms. In his free time besides spending time with his family he enjoys playing with technology, such as flying model aircrafts, and being in contact with the sea, either above, sailing, or below the surface, scuba diving. [Published: 02/11/2016] |
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European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) |
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I studied physics in Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and completed my PhD in Universidad de Santiago de Compostela in 1997. From 1992 to 2001 I worked in High Energy Physics research at CERN, in the experiments SMC and LHCb. Afterwards, until the end of 2008, I was in the IT consulting industry as project leader managing application development projects, mainly for mobile devices as Mobile Phones and PDAs. I have joined DPAC in December 1st 2008 as project scheduler in the project office. My main responsibility in DPAC is to generate and track the master schedule of the consortium integrating data and milestones from all different sources. Besides that, and as member of the project office, I will assist the project coordinator in other PO tasks like preparation of ESA reviews, maintaining the consortium WBS and risk register, generate reports for DPACE and ESA... [Published: 03/02/2009] |
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European Space Astronomy Centre |
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Raúl Gutiérrez joined ESA in 2013, as software and database engineer in the design and implementation of the Gaia Archive within the ESA Science Archives and VO Team at ESAC, as part of CU9. After obtaining his degree in Telecommunication Engineering in 2001, Raúl started working at the Spanish National Institute for Aerospace Technology (INTA). He designed and implemented scientific archives for ground-based telescopes and space astronomical missions as GTC or INTEGRAL-OMC, as well as astronomical software like the SED builder, VOSED. Also, as technical leader of the Spanish Virtual Observatory (SVO), Raúl has been involved in Virtual Observatory projects as the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) and EURO-VO. Raúl enjoys building and flying RC planes, badminton and collaborating with wildlife preservation organisations. [Published: 12/01/2015] |
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Retired Gaia contributors
Gaia was proposed in 1993 and since then many people have been involved in the Gaia mission in some way. Here, some profiles of former Gaia contributors are given. A more complete list of the people who have been involved in the Gaia mission can be found from the acknowledgements given with each data release.
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EADS Astrium (Toulouse) |
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Maité Aimé joined the Gaia project in January 2006 as Prime Project Controller and Contracts Officer. Maité joined Astrium (former Matra Espace) in 1989. As Project Controller she worked on various scientific payload projects installed on board Columbus, the European module of the International Space Station (ISS). In her free time, she enjoys travelling and sky watching. Maité is no longer working for the Gaia project. [Published: 04/02/2014] |
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European Space Agency |
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Matthew is currently a Young Gradate Trainee working at ESA on a one year contract, working under the supervision of Jos De Bruijne, within the Research and Scientific Support Department at ESTEC. The aim of the position is to gain experience of working within the scientific community and to build and improve skills to help in future employment, whilst contributing to ESA. Matthews involvement in Gaia is focused towards the star detection process which operates on board Gaia, with the aim of improving the detection of Ultra Bright stars by testing the on-board detection algorithm. Matthew received his Masters in Astrophysics from Cardiff University in 2011, after completing dissertations in the fields of extra-solar planets and studying asteroids in the infra-red. His aim after the employment with ESA is to work towards a PhD, also within Astrophysics, with the aim of working within the scientific community in the future. Matthew is no longer working for the Gaia mission. [Published: 10/11/2011] |
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Observatorio Nacional / MCT |
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Alexandre Humberto Andrei graduated in Astronomy (from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Observatorio do Valongo) and received his MSc in Astrometry from the Instituto Astronomico e Geofisico da Universidade de Sao Paulo (IAG/USP). He was awarded his PhD in 1988 from the Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, UK, for his thesis on "Observed and Predicted Data in Radio Astrometric Observations". Alexandre has Brazilian-Rumanian citizenship and is Senior Researcher at Observatorio Nacional (Brazil) and Lecturer at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Other long-term positions were held at the University of York (Canada) and at the Observatoire de Paris. His main scientific interests lie in the fields of optical and radio astrometry, and solar physics. He is an associate member of the Relativity and Reference Frame Working Group working on quasar characteristics and distribution, with a view to building a simulation of the Gaia extragalactic reference frame.
Alexandre left the Gaia mission in January 2020.
[Published: 09/01/2006] |
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University of Barcelona |
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Guillem Anglada-Escudé is a PhD student at the University of Barcelona under the supervision of Jordi Torra and co-advisor Sergei Klioner (from the Lohrmann Observatory, Dresden). For one of his first contributions to Gaia, Guillem was involved in the integration of the relativistic model for the simulation/reduction processes in a consistent way (in the context of the GDASS2 study). His PhD thesis is devoted to the study of some key aspects of Gaia observations from a relativistic point of view. These include the effect of the satellite rotation, a refined kinematic model for stellar sources in nonlinear motion, and the sensitivity of Gaia measurements to the relativistic parameters of light deflection by Solar System planets. Guillem also devotes a small part of his research time to exoplanet detection techniques by means of timing eclipsing binaries. In the non-academic world, Guillem was "Councillor of Culture, Citizen participation and Youth" in his home village city council (Ullastrell, a small village near Barcelona). He resigned this position in 2005 to focus on his PhD thesis. More detailed information on his research and personal interests can be found in his web page. Guillem is no longer working for the Gaia Mission.
[Published: 29/05/2006] |
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European Space Agency |
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Salim Ansari was closely involved with Gaia activities from 2001 to 2005 during which time he was ESA's technical officer for the GDAAS data analysis prototype study (2001-04). This involved close monitoring and coordination of the activities of GMV and the University of Barcelona, running of the configuration control board, supervision of the testing programme, and the integration and interface of the community's software algorithms through the Gaia Algorithm and Tracking Tool set up at ESTEC. Salim's Gaia interests were primarily in the areas of data processing, data mining, and data visualisation. The 'Interactive Books of Gaia' on the web sites were his brainchild. He left Gaia in early 2006. [Published: 03/05/2004 | Updated: 06/11/2006] |
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University of Barcelona |
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Erika started working in the Gaia Team at the UB in March 2012. She worked as a software developer for the Gaia Object Generator (GOG) of CU2. She focused mainly on the validation of the error models of photometry, spectroscopy and physical data, their improvements, and also technical issues and supporting users. She obtained her B.Sc. Degree in Computer Engineering in November 2011 from the Universidad Centroccidental "Lisandro Alvarado" in Venezuela. Before this, she was working in the development and implementation of a database of hundreds of RR Lyrae stars discovered by Kathy Vivas and Cecilia Mateu in the Centro de Investigaciones de Astronomía, Mérida, Venezuela. Also, she was trained as an observer in the Schmidt telescope belonging to the Observatorio Llano del Hato, also located in Venezuela. Erika left Gaia in 2016. [Published: 29/01/2013] |
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Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie |
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Tri L. Astraatmadja obtained a BSc in astronomy from the Department of Astronomy of the Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia, after having succesfully defended his Bachelor's thesis about a calculation of the local stellar kinematics using Hipparcos data. Tri later moved to Leiden, The Netherlands, to pursue a master study at Leiden Observatory. In Leiden he worked under the supervision of Anthony Brown and Yuri Levin to develop search criteria to detect hypervelocity stars using astrometric data. His Master's thesis was supervised by Koen Kuijken, in which he performed a photometric and kinematical analysis of stars in the Galactic Bulge, using data obtained by the Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). He obtained his MSc degree in 2008. In the same year he started his PhD research at Nikhef Amsterdam and the Physics Department of Leiden University. Together with Maarten de Jong and The ANTARES Collaboration, he tried to detect TeV gamma-rays using the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope. The search was unsuccessful, but the method and analysis has been written for posterity, and nevertheless he obtained his PhD degree. In September 2012, he joined the Gaia CU8 Group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, as a postdoctoral researcher. He managed the Multiple Stellar Classification (MSC) package, a software developed to estimate the astrophysical parameters of binary stars observed by Gaia. Tri's homepage can be found here. Tri left Gaia in 2016. [Published: 25/07/2013, Updated: 28/03/2017] |
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European Space Agency |
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Samy started his young graduate traineeship at ESA on 1 October 2013 under the supervision of Jos de Bruijne. He works on Gaia's object detection and confirmation performance in view of the proposal to extend the faint end of the Gaia survey from G=20 to G=21 mag, thus increasing the number of objects which could be observed by Gaia's instruments. There are single and binary stars amongst the objects in question but also spurious ones such as cosmic rays, solar protons and sky-background-induced false detections. The aim of the project is to optimize the detection and the confirmation parameters inside Gaia's on-board detection software to reject, as much as possible, the spurious objects and keep the ones of interest. In his spare time Samy enjoys listening to old records, playing video games, meeting friends and reading books, manga or bande dessinée. Samy left Gaia in 2015. [Published: 19/12/2014] |
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European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) |
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Nana Bach is software test engineer, operator and database administrator backup in the Gaia Team at ESAC. She studied Medical Informatics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. During her studies she worked as a software developer for the First Look Team at ARI (Astronomisches-Rechen-Institut) Heidelberg. In 2007 she moved to Spain and started to work in the Gaia SOC Team at ESAC. Her main responsibilities are defining and executing different test cases at ESAC, as well as the operating of all the systems that are running at SOC. She is also working within the Gaia database administration team. Nana left Gaia in 2017. [Published: 9/3/2011] |
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European Space Agency |
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Yolanda, a telecommunications engineer from Barcelona, came to ESTEC for 1 year starting in July 2002 as an ESA Young Graduate Trainee assigned to Gaia. Since her arrival she has primarily concentrated on developing the Gaia Algorithm Tracking Tool (GATT). This Cold-Fusion-based tool is used by the Gaia scientific community to upload and manage algorithm source code, routines and other relevant documentation used in the Gaia Data Access and Analysis Study Group. In addition to improving and maintaining GATT, Yolanda is now turning her attention towards investigating the feasibility of using the GRID for Gaia. Yolanda is no longer working for the Gaia mission. [Published: 13/10/2003. Updated: 16/04/2009] |
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European Space Agency |
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Jean-Pierre Balley is the Product Assurance and Safety Manager for Gaia, working as integrated support within the Project Team. Jean-Pierre obtained his mechanical engineer diploma in 1991 from the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC), his specialisation field being Quality Assurance. He spent 12 years in this field in Industry at EADS Les Mureaux (previously named Aerospatiale), mainly working on the Ariane 5 launcher and the Automated Transfer Vehicle ATV, supporting various in-house and subcontracted structures, propulsion systems, pyrotechnical devices and mechanisms. He joined the European Space Agency in 2003 as support engineer in charge of several projects like the AmerHis advanced telecommunication payload or the Vega small launcher. Jean-Pierre is based at ESTEC in The Netherlands. He is no longer working for the Gaia mission. [Published: 29/01/2008] |
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European Space Agency |
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Manuela Baroni joined the Gaia Project Team in February 2010 as Project Controller. She is a Telecommunications Engineer, graduated at the University of Siena (Italy) and specialised in electromagnetics and electromagnetic compatibility. She has been enjoying working in environmental test laboratories and spacecraft development in industry for several years, taking care of missions like Cosmo Skymed, Sharad, and ATV. In 2003, she moved to ESA, in the Netherlands. After a few years of R&D in the Technical Directorate, she passed to the Human Spaceflight domain, slowly moving from the technical field, via the Columbus payloads and the Soyuz missions, into management and project control. In her free time, Manuela enjoys scuba diving, including teaching, also in the Dutch waters, murky but swarming with life. From the underwater wonders, to the sky depths, as an amateur astronomer she also loves to contemplate the sky with her big binoculars, when the Dutch weather and light pollution allow. Manuela no longer works for the Gaia mission. Published: 01/02/2013 |
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INTEGRAL Science Data Center (ISDC) |
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Mathias is the manager of the Data Processing Centre for the Variability Processing in Geneva. Prior to working on Gaia Mathias was involved in the development and operations of the INTEGRAL Science Data Centre. Mathias graduated in physics in 1993 at the University of Heidelberg. He obtained his PhD in 1996 at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics. During his studies Mathias spent almost five years at CERN working on various hard- and software related aspects of two experiments in high energy particle physics. Mathias left Gaia in 2018. [Published: 17/07/2012] |
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Laboratoire Universitaire d'Astrophysique de Nice |
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Philippe Bendjoya has been involved in asteroid science since completing his PhD in 1993. After some early work on identification of asteroid families, he has mostly concentrated on photometric, spectroscopic and polarimetric observations of these bodies. Philippe is a member of CU4 and CU8 and is particularly interested in the classification of asteroids according to taxonomic type. The surface mineralogy characteristics of these small bodies will be obtained by spectroscopic observations and these data will be analyzed by clustering methods that he is developing and testing. Philippe works at L.U.A.N (Laboratoire Universitaire d'Astrophysique de Nice) in U.N.S.A (Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis) where he also teaches physics and astronomy. Philippe left Gaia in 2018. [Published: 12/06/2006] |
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Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur |
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Albert Bijaoui is a senior astronomer at the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur. His scientific activities have revolved around data analysis in astronomy. He was previously involved in several Gaia working groups (imaging, radial velocity spectrometer). Now, he participates in CU8: Astrophysical Parameters. Albert is also the Scientist in Charge for the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur within the ELSA (European Leadership in Astrometry) programme. Albert left Gaia in 2018. [Published: 05/02/2007] |
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Emeritus Professor, |
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Adriaan Blaauw (1914-2010) passed away on the 1st December 2010. Amongst Adriaan's many contributions to astronomy over a long career, he served as Chair of the Scientific Programme Selection Committee for Hipparcos, between 1981-90, supervising the scientific priorities of proposals competing for including stars within the Hipparcos observing list. He has always maintained a strong interest in the use of data from Hipparcos, for instance the observations of OB associations confirming some of his insights into the star formation process made more than half a century ago. Adriaan was Honorary Chair of the Scientific Organising Committee of the Gaia Symposium which was held in Paris in October 2004. Obituaries can be found at the Leiden Observatory and ESO web sites. [Published: 12/04/2004 | Updated: 10/12/2010] |
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European Space Agency |
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Carmen Blasco joined the Gaia Project Scientist's Support Team at ESTEC in March 2008 as the Information Manager. She studied Computer Engineering at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid and Physics at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain). She received her MSc in Astrophysics from Universidad Complutense de Madrid in July 2008. From 2002 to 2008 she worked for an outreach project called PARTNeR, that performs radio astronomical observations with a 34m antenna located at the NASA's satellite tracking station in Madrid. During this time she was the Support Astronomer and developed data reduction software for single dish observations. She has also been involved with coordinating scientific activities for primary and secondary school students. In January 2007, she was appointed the Project Manager for PARTNeR. Carmen is especially interested in outreach. She left the project in January 2013. [Published: 10/03/2008 | Updated: 14/08/2008 and 29/01/2013] |
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Observatoire de Paris-Meudon |
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Steve Boudreault is a Gaia Computer Scientist at the Paris Observatory, Meudon site. He is working on the project FP7 Genius and CU9 for the validation of the scientific data from Gaia. After a degree in Physics at Laval University in Quebec City and a Master degree at Montreal University in Montreal (Canada), Steve moved to Heidelberg (Germany) where he obtained his PhD in 2008 at Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg with a thesis about the formation of brown dwarfs. Steve left Gaia in November 2015.
[Published: 16/11/2010; Updated 04/12/2013] |
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Boostec |
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Michel Bougoin is one of the directors of Boostec, a small French company based in Tarbes, south-west of Toulouse, world leaders in the development of silicon carbide mirrors for ground and space applications. Working closely with Astrium Toulouse, Boostec has developed the prototype mirrors for Gaia (2002-04) during the industrial definition study (see Gaia Picture of the Week for 7 July 2003). Find out more about Boostec from their website. Michel is no longer working for the Gaia mission. [Published: 10/11/2003] |
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CNES, Toulouse |
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Guy Boutonnet worked at CNES in Toulouse since 1990, he spent all his career in the development of ground segments for several well-known space missions: SSALTO (altimetry), Pléiades (earth observation), Gaia, and many other contributions. Guy was an active member of the Gaia DPCC team between 2012 and 2014, as CU6 and CU8 Technical Coordinator, and then he took the role of CFOSAT (oceanography project with China) ground segment manager. He was universally appreciated by everybody for his professionalism and humanity, one cannot forget the large smile on his face. Guy was fond of cycling, travelling and very proud of his family, and since several months a very happy grandfather. Guy will be deeply missed, our thoughts go out to Guy’s family.”
[Published: 2018] |
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e2v technologies, |
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Steve Bowring is a senior design engineer for e2v technologies, the UK-based company that is manufacturing the CCDs for Gaia. Steve has been designing CCDs at e2v for more than 15 years and has been involved with several important ESA programmes, including XMM-Newton and Rosetta, prior to his involvement in Gaia-related activities. Steve has also been involved with many ground-based and space-borne astronomy programmes leading to the design of the large area Gaia CCD arrays. Visit the e2v technologies web site to learn more about their activities. See the Picture of the week featuring the first e2v CCDs for Gaia. Steve is no longer working for the Gaia mission. [Published: 19/01/2004] |
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EADS-Astrium (Toulouse) |
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Philippe Charvet works in Toulouse where he is the study manager of the Astrium team in charge of the ESA contract for the System Level Technical Assistance phase (2002-04). He was study manager for the Gaia reassessment study conducted during 2002. His background is system and mechanical engineering: his previous project experience includes SPOT 5 (as system engineer), Meteosat (as verification engineer) and Helios 1 (as mechanical architect). Philippe left Gaia in 2015. [Published: 14/07/2003] |
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Gaia People |
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Observatoire de Paris-Meudon |
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Fabien Chéreau graduated from INSA, the French engineering university at Lyon in France. He now works at the Paris Observatory in Meudon on a CNES-funded position for the On-board Detection and the Radial Velocity Spectrometer working groups. Fabien wrote the first version of the Gaia on-board detection algorithm. He is currently working on the definition of the Spectro sky mappers and is in charge of the development of the algorithms for these instruments. Fabien is also the author of Stellarium - a free astronomy software package which renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time. To learn more about Stellarium visit the website. He left Gaia in 2007. [Published: 23/02/2004 | Updated: 14/08/2008] |
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University of Barcelona (DPCB) |
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Marcial Clotet completed his Telecommunication Engineering degree in 2010 at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona). His thesis, advised by Enrique García-Berro and Jordi Portell, was focused on robust entropy coders exploring a better solution to the CCSDS 121.0 compression standard for space. He also completed his degree in Business Management and Administration from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) in 2011. After working in the private sector and living in London, he returned to Barcelona to join the Gaia team at the UB in June 2011. He is the DPCB Quality Manager and Configuration Manager, and he also works as a software developer, mainly focused on DpcbTools. Working in Gaia allows him to combine two passions: astronomy and computers. Marcial left Gaia in 2017 Published: 29/01/2013 |
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INAF |
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Gabriele Cocozza gratueted at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" in the 2004. The he moved in Bologna, where he completed his PhD at the Astronomy Department of the University of Bologna (Italy) at the beginning of 2008. He has been involved in the ESA mission Gaia since 2009, when he joined the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), in the CU5 DU13 team at the Observatory of Bologna (Italy), in charge of building a suitable grid of spectrophotometric standard stars for the absolute calibration of the Gaia G-band and BP/RP photometric system. Gabriele left Gaia in 2018 Published: 01/02/2013 | Updated: 27/10/2017 |
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European Space Agency |
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Giovanni Colangelo is the Spacecraft System Engineer for Gaia responsible, within the project team, for establishing and managing the overall Gaia system requirements and coordinating the interfaces between all mission elements. Giovanni obtained his degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1991, and worked for several years for Alenia Aerospazio before joining the European Space Agency in 1997. At ESA, he has also been system engineer for many of the Agency's science missions during their assessment study phases (Solar Orbiter, Eddington, Storms) and for several micro-gravity payloads for the International Space Station. Giovanni completed a Master of Space System Engineering (Delft University) in 2004. Giovanni is not working for Gaia since the 1st April 2012. [Published: 02/05/2005 | Updated: 03/04/2012] |
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Royal Observatory of Belgium |
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We are sad to hear that Jan Cuypers suddenly passed away on 28 February 2017. Jan obtained his PhD at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where he continued to work as a researcher for several years. In 1987, he was appointed at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. He became responsible for the information service in 1997, and in 2015 he was nominated as the head of the department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, after being its acting head for a number of years. Jan's scientific career started with the study of a method of period analysis for the short-period variable stars of type Beta Cephei and Be stars. He extended his work to theoretical studies of period search methods of variable phenomena applied to various types of celestial objects. He acquired an international reputation in the field of period analysis of variable stars. Because of his lifelong interest in the variability of stars and his former contribution to the Hipparcos mission, it is no surprise that Jan would become involved in Gaia. Jan thus joined the DPAC at its start in 2006. He played a major role within Coordination Unit 7, which handles the variability analysis. He was a member of its Steering Committee and responsible for the variability characterization work package. In this package, he applied his knowledge of the statistical properties of period search methods, and adapted them to the specific needs of the Gaia data. As part of the validation, he applied these techniques also to other large data sets, such as those of Hipparcos and OGLE. Jan was the Observatory Co-PI of the Belgian PRODEX-project centred on the preparation of Gaia and funded by BELSPO, and he was proud to see the first scientific results of his work, as the first Gaia Data Release contained light curves for a number of Cepheid and RR Lyrae variables. The scope of his interest in astronomy was very broad, first as a young amateur astronomer and member of the local amateur astronomers club Helios, later as the head of the information service of the Observatory and member of the Board of Directors of the "Vlaamse Vereniging voor Sterrenkunde" (the Flemish astronomy association). As a science communicator, he enjoyed explaining the celestial phenomena and the latest astronomical news to both the media and the public. In his spare time, he was leading the local association Helios, and was in regular contact with the community of Flemish amateurs where he was a most welcome guest speaker. His sudden passing is a great loss. We thank him for all he did at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Our thoughts go out to Jan's family. [Published: 01/04/2009, Updated: 20/06/2017] |
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Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, |
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Kim received his PhD in 2012 at the Department of Astronomy, Yonsei University, South Korea. During his 5 year PhD period, he had been affiliated as a predoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to study time series analysis and QSO classification using machine learning. He recently joined the Gaia CU8 group as a postdoc at MPIA, Heidelberg, and works for the classification of astronomical objects using machine learning algorithms. His research interests are massive astronomical database analysis, source classification using machine learning, and time series analysis. Especially, he has a big interest in QSO variability. [Published: 10/12/2012] |
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Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels |
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Peter De Cat is primarily interested in observational studies of pulsating main-sequence stars (with special attention to multiple systems). He obtained his PhD in 2001 at the Catholic University of Leuven with an observational study of bright southern slowly pulsating B stars. After a post-doc of 2 years at the same institute, he obtained a staff position at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, where he additionally started to study the small members of the solar system (astrometry of asteroids). Peter's involvement in the Gaia mission began in 2002 as a core member of the Variable Stars working group. Since then he has become a member of CU4 (Object processing), CU6 (Spectroscopic processing), and CU7 (Variability processing). He is (or will be) contributing to work packages GWP-M-440-20000 (Astrometric Reduction), GWP-S-660-00000 (Multiple transits analysis), and GWP-S-711-00000 (Variability Characterisation) & GWP-S-712-00000 (Classification), respectively. [Published: 25/07/2006] |
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University of Padova |
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Fernando de Felice is a core member of the Relativity and Reference Frame Working Group (RRFWG) of Gaia. His main task is to lead the RAMOD project to completion. This project is aimed at developing a numerical code which will take into account the general relativistic effects (due to the Sun and to most of the Solar System planets and their largest satellites) required to correct the Gaia observations in order to achieve microarcsecond accuracies. The RAMOD project is a joint collaboration with Beatrice Bucciarelli, Maria Teresa Crosta, Mario Lattanzi and Alberto Vecchiato of Torino Observatory. Fernando de Felice is working in the fields of general relativity and astrophysics. His current position is full professor of theoretical physics at the University of Padova (Italy). Fernando retired from Gaia DPAC in 2018 [Published: 24/01/2005] |
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Catania University |
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Antonino Del Popolo completed his undergraduate studies at Bologna University in 1990, and his graduate studies at Catania University in 1994. He worked as a researcher at the CRL (NICT) Institute (Tokyo), at the Argelander Institute (Bonn), as an assistant professor at Bosphorus University (Istanbul), and as a full professor at Istanbul Technical University (Istanbul). He has been visiting professor at Bogazici University (Istanbul), Sao Paulo University, Brazil, and at the International Institute of Physics, Natal, Brazil. Since November 2008, Antonino is Researcher-Adjunct Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Catania University. He is also an associated member of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). Antonino's main interests are Cosmological Physics (CDM models, structure formation). He has also been involved with migration models in extra-planetary systems, and stochastic forces in gravitational systems. Recently he has been working on the effects of baryons on CDM predictions on small scales showing how baryon physics can solve the weak points of the ΛCDM model on kpcs scales. Antonino has been involved in Gaia since 2000. He was member of the Gaia PS task. His main interest is in the field of exo-planets and the study of substructure around the Milky Way. [Published: 19/11/2014] |
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Observatoire de Paris-Meudon |
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Céline Delle Luche joined GEPI (Observatoire de Paris-Meudon) and the Gaia team in january 2006 as a research engineer, to work on image simulation and mostly development of spectroscopic processing in CU6. She is working on algorithms of determination of radial velocity, and she is also involved at system level, for example she is co-responsible of the CU6 data model. She graduated in 2003 from CPE, a french engineer school in electronics and information technology. But she developed a taste in astronomy and made a studentship in Nice observatory in 2001, and then at ESO Chile in 2003-2005. Her main interest in science is image and signal processing applied to astronomy, and in her free time she enjoys hiking, photography, music and cooking! [Published: 03/05/2010] |
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University of Leicester |
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Mike is the Project Manager for the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre and is based in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester. His current research interest is the statistical analysis of sources with spatially extended X-ray emission, which are present in the XMM-Newton public archive. Mike is a member of Gaia's On-ground and In-orbit Calibration Working Group. He is producing prototype software to investigate the pipeline processing of TDI format CCD data such as those which will be generated by Gaia. Mike left Gaia in 2006. [Published: 24/05/2004 | Updated: 08/09/2008] |
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Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Heidelberg |
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Dirk Dorsch is a recently graduated bachelor of computer science. On 15 December 2006 he started work as a software engineer in the Gaia group of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut at Heidelberg. He will mainly work on Java programming for the First Look and other core processing tasks. Dirk's first job was to transform the Fortran prototype of the "ring solution" method for the First-Look subtask called "one-day astrometric solution" into Java software suited to run within the Gaia processing environment. He left Gaia in June 2008. [Published: 02/04/2007. Updated: 14/08/2008] |
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e2v technologies |
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Tim Eaton is the CCD Project Technical Authority at e2v technologies, the UK based manufacturer of the large area scientific CCDs selected for the Astrometric Field Focal Plane Array of Gaia. (See news item for 2005-06-09). Tim has many years experience as Technical Authority on projects supplying CCDs to Space Applications, having worked previously on Envisat (MERIS), XMM Newton and Rosetta for ESA missions, COROT for CNES, Hubble WFC3 for NASA and various CCD Star-tracker programmes. He also has previous experience of other electronic imaging products for military and aerospace applications. [Published: 29/08/2005] |
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European Space Agency |
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Christina is a trainee at the Research and Scientific Support Department at ESTEC from September until December 2011. She works under the supervision of Jos De Bruijne about F. Mignards 'Hundred Thousand Proper Motion' Project. The aim of her project is to determine which of the stars measured by the Hipparcos Mission, that are going to be measured by Gaia again, need to have a precisely measured radial velocity in order to determine the proper motion of the star accurately. Christina has received her Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Goettingen in July 2011. After her internship at ESTEC she is going to continue her studies. [Published: 19/12/2011] |
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European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) |
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Sebastian joined the DPAC Project Office (PO) in October 2009 as Interface Engineer. The past five years he was working in the framework of the site selection for the Thirty Meter Telescope. Between 2004-2005 at Caltech and since then at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Before that, he worked in the adaptive optics team of the Isaac-Newton Group on La Palma. He studied Physics in Hamburg and Heidelberg and obtained a PhD in Astronomy in 2002 from the University of Heidelberg. On 1 July 2013 Sebastian took on the position of Project Coordinator and Head of the DPAC Project Office at ESAC. Apart from Gaia, his instrumentation interests are mainly in the areas of measuring optical turbulence and in adaptive optics. His scientific interests are in the areas of atmospheric physics and extrasolar planets. [Published: 26/10/09] |
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European Space Agency |
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Matthias Erdmann took his Dipl.-Ing. Photographical Engineering studies at the University of Applied Science in Cologne and graduated in 1990. He then joined Steinheil (Munich) and worked as an optical designer and Kayser-Threde (also in Munich) as a system engineer. In January 2006, he joined the Gaia Project team (ESTEC) as a PLM engineer. He is responsible for aspects like:
[Published: 07/02/2012] |
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GEPI |
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Krzysztof Findeisen joined GEPI and the Gaia team as a postdoc in November 2014. He is working in CU9 on the validation of the Gaia data and pipeline. [Published: 19/11/2014] |
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European Space Operations Centre |
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For the majority of his professional career Alan has worked as a Spacecraft Controller for the European Space Agency. He started working for ESA in 1985 as a Spacecraft Controller for EXOSAT, the predecessor of XMM-NEWTON. Later he joined the Launch and Early Orbit Phase team for the launches of the METEOSAT P2 & F3 satellites. In 1989 Alan changed again to work as Spacecraft Controller for the HIPPARCOS mission (Gaia's predecessor) for three years. Since then he has had the pleasure to work for other ESA Astronomy missions such as ISO, XMM-NEWTON and INTEGRAL. Alan has been working as a part of the Gaia Flight Control Team since June 2013. His personal interests include swimming, hiking and restoring classic motorcycles. Alan left Gaia DPAC in 2018. [Published: 09/01/2014] |
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CNES |
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Benoit joined CNES and the Gaia project in 2007 as the CU4 technical coordinator. He gained his engineering degree from Paris Tech. [Published: 30/04/2015] |
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University of A Coruña |
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Diego Fustes is a PhD Computer Science student at the University of A Coruña, Spain. He is involved in CU8, working on the design of algorithms for astrophysical parameter estimation by means of RVS spectra (GSP-Spec) and unsupervised classification of point sources (OA,OCA). His interests are machine learning, data mining and biologically inspired algorithms, as well as Astronomy and Physics in general. In the future, Diego will be involved in CU9, working on science enabling applications that will allow to exploit the full Gaia potential. He aims to develop user friendly interfaces for the astronomical community, in a way that they will be able to use the most advanced algorithms to analyse huge amounts of data, without the need of a great effort.
In his free time, Diego enjoys skateboarding, gaming and travelling. He wants to discover as many places as possible.
Diego left the Gaia mission in 2014.
[Published: 29/01/2014] |
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ESAC |
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Maria is Computer Science Engineer. She studied at the Facultad of Informática at the Universidad Politécnica in Madrid. Maria recently joined the Science Operations Department at ESAC as PA Manager. As part of her functions, she is providing QA/PA support to the Gaia Project Office team and to the DPCE sand SOC team. In this role she performs QA tasks to define and improve Gaia development and operation processes in coordination with the Configuration manager and the Operation team manager. Before joining ESA, Maria worked in embedded software systems projects for Spanish private companies related to telecommunications and automatic automation but most of her time for the Spanish Navy. Maria also worked in the ESA Technical and Quality Management Department at ESTEC in The Netherlands for more than 13 years, as software PA providing support to a wide range of projects, including not only scientific projects but also Earth Observation and rockets. Maria left the Gaia mission in January 2021. [Published: 26/06/2015] |
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Department of Applied Physics, |
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Enrique García-Berro has two very distinct areas of interest in Gaia. His technical interests cover various aspects of the on-board sampling and telemetry stream definition, where he supervises the related PhD studies of Jordi Portell, and works closely with the University of Barcelona team working on data simulation and the GDAAS data analysis system. His Gaia scientific interests are related to the white dwarf luminosity function, white dwarf kinematics, and their evolution and associated problems of fundamental physics, including the hypothetical variation of the gravitational constant. Enrique left Gaia in 2006.
26/09/2017: It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of Enrique García-Berro during the weekend due to a climbing accident in Huesca, in the Pyrenees. Enrique, a professor at the UPC, has made numerous outstanding scientific contributions in the field of the study of white dwarfs, and he has also carried out service tasks at the UPC and the Generalitat de Catalunya. In addition, he has always been a very active member of the IEEC. We will deeply miss him, as a colleague and as a friend. [Published: 17/11/2003 | Updated: 08/09/2008 | Updated: 26 September 2017] |
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Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino (OATo) |
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Daniele is a member of the Coordination Unit 2 (Data Simulations) responsible for the Instrument Model (DU4 Manager), and a member of the Coordination Unit 3 (Core Processing), responsible for the Image Parameter Determination WP and for the Basic Angle Monitoring device data analysis WP. He was the Project Scientist within the contract "Gaia - Laser metrology and active optics control" with Alenia Spazio funded by the European Space Agency. He was previously an Associate Member of the Payload design/CCD Working Group, and a Core Member of the On-ground and In-orbit calibration Working Group. He is working as a staff member at the Torino Astronomical Observatory, within the tecnology group. Daniele left the Gaia mission in 2014. [Published: 03/07/2008] |
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Universitat de Barcelona |
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Nora joined the Gaia Team at the UB in June 2011. Since then she has been working in CU3 as a software developer and testing engineer for the IDT and IDA/IDV projects, focusing on the revision, implementation and validation of scientific algorithms but also supporting framework and technical issues. Nora obtained her B.Sc Degree in Telecommunications Engineering in 2008 from the Universidad Pública de Navarra, and her M.Sc degree in Information and Communication Technologies in 2011 from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. She did her Master Thesis research project about nanocommunication networks with the N3Cat group (NaNoNetworking center in Catalonia). Her work on the Gaia mission represents her first steps into astronomy and now she's enthusiastic about this topic. Nora left the Gaia mission in 2017. [Published: 09/10/2012] |
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University of Barcelona |
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Marwan Gebran finished his PhD in December 2007 at the Groupe de Recherche en Astronomie et Astrophysique du Languedoc (GRAAL) in France. He was working on chemical abundances and evolution of peculiar A/F stars in open clusters. He joined the Gaia team in December 2008 at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is a member of CU5 working on the absolute wavelength calibration of BP/RP spectra. Marwan's research interests include the chemical composition of stars in open clusters and in the field, binary stars, HgMn stars and model atmospheres. He is also an active member of the POLLUX team (database for high resolution synthetic spectra and SEDs). Marwan left Gaia in September 2010.
[Published: 18/03/2009 | Updated: 17/01/2011] |
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European Space Agency |
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Bénédicte Girouart received her Aerospace engineer diploma in 1997 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (Supaéro), with a specialisation in Control Systems. She worked nine years in this field at EADS Astrium (Toulouse), mainly on Attitude and Orbit Control Sub-systems (AOCS) and Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC), starting with R&D activities (advanced control and estimation theory, re-entry, navigation techniques, and Phase-A studies) before moving towards AOCS development and validation for Earth Observation and Scientific programmes (Pléiades, Venus Express, and THEOS). She joined the European Space Agency in 2006 as Control Systems Engineer in the Control System Division of the Directorate of Technical and Quality Management, in ESTEC. Since then, she has been providing AOCS support for Gaia, together with being technical officer for several AOCS exploratory activities and advanced studies and being involved in ECSS standard preparation. Published: 08/02/2013 |
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Universitat de Barcelona and UPC |
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Juanjo González completed his Telecommunication Engineering degree in 2010 at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Barcelona). His thesis was focused on molecular spectroscopy applied to art works analysis in the Raman spectroscopy group. His journey into the world of space missions began in 2010 when he worked at Pildo Labs in the SMOSCat project, aimed at augmenting the resolution of the SMOS satellite measurements using disaggregation methodologies. Juanjo joined the Gaia team at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) in January 2012. He is the IDT, IDU and DPCB Test Manager. He is also working as a software and testing engineer mainly focused on implementing and validating scientific and technical developments in IDT, and in the data handling, management and arrangement at DPCB - specially on the DPCB Data Manager (DDM). In parallel, Juanjo is doing a PhD at the UPC in the Raman spectroscopy group. His research is based on pattern recognition applied to the identification of artistic materials, crucial in the conservation, restoration and authentication of art works. He thus combines his passion for astronomy and art, working on Gaia and at the UPC. Juanjo left Gaia DPAC in 2019. [Published: 09/01/2014] |
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Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (Germany) |
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Following her doctorate at the University of Bonn in 1995, her career took her to Urbana-Champaign (Illinois), Würzburg, Santa Cruz (California) and ultimately to Seattle (Washington) on one of the much-coveted Hubble Fellowships. From 2000 to 2003 she headed a research group at the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy (Heidelberg). Then she was appointed professor at the University of Basel and director of the Astronomical Institute. In 2007 she returned to Heidelberg where she is a professor at the Centre for Astronomy (ZAH) of the University of Heidelberg and director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ARI). Eva Grebel's main research interests centre around the structure, dynamics and evolution of the Milky Way, stellar populations and galaxy evolution. Within this framework she has devoted her research above all to the highly topical field of dwarf galaxies and to so-called near-field cosmology, employing "galactic archaeology" to reconstruct the evolution of nearby galaxies in detail by studying the abundant remnants of stellar evolution epochs of the past. Since 2007 she was a member of the Gaia Science Team. In 2009 Eva joined the ESA Astronomy Working Group (AWG) and consequently resigned from the Gaia Science Team. Eva left the Gaia mission. [Published: 19/01/2009] |
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University of Barcelona |
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After a semester studying in Norway, Andrés joined the Gaia team at the University of Barcelona (UB) in July 2015. While working on Gaia, he is currently also writing his final degree project to complete his studies in Physics. Andres left the Gaia mission in 2016. [Published: 03/12/2015] |
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LSST |
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Leanne Guy received her Ph.D in particle physics from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 1999. Leanne's research focused on the study of strange B meson decays at the LHC and the sensitivity of the ATLAS detector to measure CP violation parameters. After her Ph.D studies, Leanne worked as a staff member and section leader at CERN, developing Grid middleware and the data processing systems used today to manage data from the LHC experiments. Leanne subsequently worked in investment banking as Grid systems manager, developing and managing a global Grid computing system for derivatives trading. In 2007, Leanne joined the Variability Processing Group, CU7, at the Observatoire de Genève, working predominantly on variability detection and the development of algorithms for the characterisation of variable stars. In her free time, Leanne enjoys skiing, mountaineering, scuba diving, and travelling to remote places. In 2008, on an expedition to the north pole, she collected data in support of ESA's ice mission CryoSat-2, reported in an ESA web article. Leanne left Gaia at the end of 2017 to take up the position of Data Management Scientist on LSST in the USA. She can be contacted at leanne.guy @ lsst.org.
Published: 15/02/2013 / Updated: 23 May 2018 |
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European Space Agency |
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Helma van de Kamp-Glasbergen has been the ESA Project secretary for Gaia since day one, so Gaia is her first baby. Helma is also the mother of two boys. Her hobbies are her family, reading, and cooking.
Helma left the Gaia mission. Published: 29/01/2013 |
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Gaia people archive