{"id":170,"date":"2019-04-05T09:55:46","date_gmt":"2019-04-05T09:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auditore.cab.inta-csic.es\/masivas\/?page_id=170"},"modified":"2025-08-09T10:14:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T10:14:07","slug":"the-team","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/auditore.cab.inta-csic.es\/masivas-torrejon\/the-team\/","title":{"rendered":"The team"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Paco Najarro<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Miriam Garc\u00eda<\/strong> 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. Garc\u00eda 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.<\/div>\n
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Lee Patrick<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Personal website: https:\/\/www.lrp-astro.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Frank Tramper<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Personal website: https:\/\/franktramper.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ra\u00fal Castellanos S\u00e1nchez<\/strong> 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 \u201cMassive stars as engines of the Universe: Studies in the near-IR\u201d. Ra\u00fal 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\u2019s atmosphere. He has led an international team of researchers to study the Westerlund-1 cluster with observations on the VLT, Chile. Ra\u00fal expects to finish his PhD in late 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alexander Legault<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alejandra Fern\u00e1ndez R\u00edo 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Jes\u00fas G\u00f3mez Mantec\u00f3n joined our team as a Master\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rogue members in Villafranca<\/h3>\n\n\n
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Miguel Cervi\u00f1o’s<\/strong> 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\u00a0 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\u00a0 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.<\/div>\n
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Former members<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Marta Lorenzo<\/strong> carried out her Master thesis on the interaction between metal-poor massive stars and their host galaxy. She developed an optimal reduction protocol for GTC-OSIRIS-MOS observations that will be applied to all our observations of OB stars in dIrr galaxies. Later on she was awarded an FPI-Mar\u00eda de Maeztu<\/em> fellowship and carryed out her PhD thesis on the massive stellar content of Sextans-A. As part of her PhD thesis she has published the largest catalog of metal-poor OB-type stars (Lorenzo et al. 2022) to date, and the first calibration of their stellar properties with spectral type (Lorenzo et al. 2025). She is currently working as a data scientist in a private company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Iris Bermejo<\/strong> joined our team in 2020 to work on the line of research of massive stars in metal-poor galaxies of the Local Group, as a Master’s student of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her thesis consisted on the first stellar census of massive stars in the dwarf irregular galaxy Leo A. At the moment, she is carrying out her PhD thesis at the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supervisors: Miriam Garc\u00eda and Paco Najarro<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mar\u00eda del Mar Rubio<\/strong> carried out her PhD thesis in our team, and tackled two fundamental issues in massive stars evolution theories: the initial mass and mass loss of massive stars. Using multi-wavelength observations she reviewed the initial mass of the most massive stars known in the Local Group, as well as, the stratification of clumping in radiation-driven winds, a critical parameter to estimate the true mass loss rates of massive stars. She is an expert on near- and far- (Herschel) infrared observations, but her studies also include photometry and spectroscopy from the ultraviolet to radio wavelengths. Currently, she is working as a postdoctoral fellow in the Departamento de F\u00edsica in the Universidad de Alcal\u00e1, carrying on multi-wavelength studies on stellar winds structure and very massive stars in the Local Group.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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Gonzalo Mu\u00f1oz<\/strong>  joined our team in 2021, after being awarded a JAE-INTRO-ICU internship from CSIC. Paco Najarro, Miriam Garc\u00eda and Maria del Mar Rubio D\u00edez acted as supervisors. He worked on near-infrared observations of massive stars in the Milky Way, reducing and modeling spectra from stars in the Mercer 23 cluster. He contributed to improve the team’s pipeline to reduce GTC-EMIR<\/a> data.<\/p>\n

In November 2021 he moved to the IAASARS (National Observatory of Athens, Greece), where he began his PhD thesis on “Episodic Mass Loss in Massive Stars: Key to Understanding the Explosive Early Universe\u201d (project ASSESS).<\/p>\n

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Marco Flores<\/strong> carried out his Master thesis on near-infrared spectroscopy of the Luminous Blue Variable star [MDF2011]15, during the 2020-2021 academic year. Simultaneously, he assessed the performance of MOLECFIT for the telluric correction of TNG-GIANO<\/a> and VLT-XSHOOTER<\/a> spectra as part of an intership. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2021.<\/p>\n

Supervisors: Mar\u00eda del Mar Rubio D\u00edez, Paco Najarro and Miriam Garc\u00eda<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Diego de la Fuente<\/strong> carried out his PhD thesis in our team. After his first postdoctoral contract in Mexico, he joined us again as a postdoc during 2019-2020. His work focused on characterizing the massive stellar content of young massive clusters in the Galactic disk with IR spectroscopy. At the moment he is an APOSTD<\/em> postdoctoral fellow at the Departamento de F\u00edsica, Ingenier\u00eda de Sistemas y Teor\u00eda de la Se\u00f1al<\/em> of the University of Alicante.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Vicente Garc\u00eda<\/strong> enjoyed a pre-doctoral contract funded by the Youth Employment Initiative<\/em> during 2019-2020. Starting from observed spectra and a grid of model atmospheres, he assessed different methods for unsupervised spectral fitting. He implemented an artificial neural network in our computers and tested its performance to derive the physical properties of O-type stars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Rosa Arenales<\/strong> carried out an internship in our team in 2019, as part of her Bachelor’s degree in Physics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her work consisted on using Python software to reduce multi-object IR spectroscopic observations taken wih EMIR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supervisors: Paco Najarro and Miriam Garc\u00eda.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Marta Ramos<\/strong> joined our team in 2016, and carried out her Master thesis entitled “Estudios en el infrarrojo de estrellas masivas en la V\u00eda L\u00e1ctea”. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supervisors: Paco Najarro and Mar\u00eda del Mar Rubio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Noem\u00ed Mateos<\/strong> joined our team in 2015, and carried out her Master thesis entitled “Supergigantes en M33: Un nuevo punto para el gradiente de metalicidad”. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2017. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supervisors: Miriam Garc\u00eda and Paco Najarro.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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More about us:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n