The team

Author: vgarcia

Paco Najarro pioneered the infrared studies of the massive stars at the Galactic Center, and the use of massive stars across the Galaxy as metallicity probes. He is an expert on the CMFGEN code, and contributes to its development since 1990. His expertise encompasses UV to radio multiwavelength quantitative spectroscopic studies of massive stars from the Milky way till galaxies beyond the Local Group. From 2005 on he was the Spanish Head of Nation within the SAFARI/SPICA consortium and one of the two Co-PIs since 2009, coordinating the Spanish participation in the mission.

najarro cab.inta-csic.es

Miriam García is mostly interested in studying resolved, metal-poor massive stars. To this aim, she is conducting a vast VLT and GTC campaign to unveil blue massive stars in nearby dwarf irregular galaxies (mostly IC1613 and Sextans-A). She is an expert on UV spectroscopy and obtained the first UV spectra of metal-poor massive stars beyond the SMC with HST. M. García developed the AUTOPOP code to look for clusters of massive stars in the Milky Way (from IR photometry) and other galaxies. Because observations of metal-poor massive stars are taking ground-based and space observatories to their limits, she is heavily involved in the science teams defining new instrumentation for the ELT and the Habitable Worlds Observatory. She is coordinating CSIC’s contribution to ELT instrumentation.
mgg cab.inta-csic.es

Lee Patrick studies evolved massive stars both in the Milky Way and various galaxies in the Local Universe. He is an expert in red supergiant stars and leads observational research projects to study their physical and binary properties. Lee exploits multi-wavelength observations from the UV to the IR on various facilities to achieve these goals. He obtained the first Hubble Space Telescope spectroscopy of companions to red supergiant stars outside of the Milky Way.

lrpatrick   cab.inta-csic.es

Personal website: https://www.lrp-astro.org/

Frank Tramper focuses on the spectroscopic study of massive stars in their various stages of evolution (e.g., O-type, Luminous Blue Variables, Wolf-Rayets). Areas of particular interest are the effect of metallicity on the physical properties of these stars and their stellar winds, and stars in their most advanced evolutionary stages. Frank is an expert in low-metallicity massive stars in the Local Universe and the use of the model atmosphere codes Fastwind and CMFGen.

ftramper   cab.inta-csic.es

Personal website: https://franktramper.com/

Raúl Castellanos Sánchez is a PhD student that focuses on the study of the massive star content of young massive clusters in the near-IR. His PhD is titled “Massive stars as engines of the Universe: Studies in the near-IR”. Raúl has become an expert in the data analysis and exploitation of near-IR spectroscopic observations and in particular the corrections for the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. He has led an international team of researchers to study the Westerlund-1 cluster with observations on the VLT, Chile. Raúl expects to finish his PhD in late 2025.

rcastellanos   cab.inta-csic.es

Alexander Legault is a PhD student that focuses on the study of massive stars using infrared spectroscopic observations. His research is based principally on JWST NIRSpec observations and he has recently been awarded almost 100 hours of NIRSpec observations to study the stellar content of the Arches cluster. Alex expects to finish his PhD in 2027.

Alejandra Fernández Río is a Master’s student working on finding runaway stars in the red supergiant population of the Large Magellanic Cloud. She will defend her thesis in September 2025. In June 2025 Alejandra was awarded a JAE-INTRO CSIC fellowship to continue this work.

Jesús Gómez Mantecón joined our team as a Master’s student working on the low-metallicity massive star population of IC1613. After a successful Ms thesis defense in September 2024, he joined the team with a JAE-INTRO CSIC fellowship. At the moment, he has begun a PhD project that builds on his Master’s work. In 2025 he was awarded 40 hours to keep studying the massive stars of observing time on the VLT, Chile to continue his studies into the stellar population of IC1613.

Rogue members in Villafranca

 
Miguel Cerviño’s main research is related with stellar population synthesis studies, with special emphasis in massive star-forming regions and star-forming galaxies, and low number statistics effects in the resulting integrated observables. Massive stars meet both situations: a low number of massive stars usually dominates the  integrated light of star-forming regions. He is also interested in interpolations techniques that would be more robust to analyse the parameter space which defines the large variety of  massive stars spectra. He complement’s our group activities by providing a top to bottom approach, i.e. from integrated properties of the population to individual stars.