| Yves Viala is a member of the scientific team at Observatoire de Paris (Department GEPI). He joined the Gaia project team in 2001 as a core member of the Gaia Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) Working Group, which evolved into the current Coordination Unit 6 (CU6).
In CU6 Yves is the coordinator of the Single Transit Analysis (STA) team, which has the primary goal to determine radial velocity from the analysis of single transit RVS spectra. In addition to the coordination of the team, Yves is also actively involved in the development, testing and validation of the pipleine results.
Before dedicating himself to STA, Yves was primarily concerned with studies of different aspects of the interstellar medium, in particular models of the chemistry, thermodynamics and radiative transfer of molecular clouds. He also contributed to the preparation of the RVS by developing a model to predict the expected telemetry budget, which was implemented at the CDS in Strasbourg and used during the phase of the RVS design.
Yves is interested in the analysis of large stellar catalogues (such as GSC-II v3, USNO, DENIS) and the determination of star number densities versus magnitude, coordinates, colour, etc., always in view of addressing specific problems related to RVS observations.
In his free time, Yves mostly enjoys long walks, working in his country home and spending time with his three grandchildren.
Having contributed to the Gaia project for 15 years, Yves will retire and leave the Observatoire at the end of November 2015. We thank him for his fundamental contribution to the Gaia Project, and hope he will continue to provide his valuable advice to CU6 from his country home in the village of Saint-Loup, in Auvergne, where he will move.
[Published: 04/09/2004 | Updated: 02/11/2015] |
