about

Hola! I’m a Chilean astronomer working at the University of St Andrews as a Posdoctoral Research Fellow in the group of Prof. Andrew C. Cameron. I got my Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille of the Aix-Marseille Universite in France. Previously I earned my B.Sc and M.Sc in Astronomy degrees from Universidad de Chile, in Santiago, Chile. My research is mainly focused on Exoplanets but I did some research on the dark side (Galaxies at high-z) during my undergrad years.

During my M.Sc, I worked looking for Transit Timing Variations (TTV) in hot Jupiters systems within the Transit Monitoring in the South (TraMoS) project. I studied three known hot Jupiters: WASP-18b, WASP-19b, WASP-77Ab combining ground-based photometry from meter-class telescopes and TESS data. Our time span of almost ten years of observations allowed us to ruled out the presence of close-in companions in resonance.

For my PhD I studied the chromaticity of the stellar activity signal of M dwarfs using optical and nIR spectra from SOPHIE and SPIRou to improve the detection of low-mass planets. In particular, I lead the study of Gl 205, an early M dwarf with no planets detected but with similar stellar activity contributions in the optical and nIR RVs. For this, I modeled the activity RVs using multi-dimensional Gaussian Processes in both domains.

Currently, I’m focused in the detection and characterization of exoplanets as a part of the HARPS-N, CHEOPS and PLATO consortia. I’m also extending my work in the use of multi-dimensional GPs looking for ways to use new activity indicators.

In 2018, with a marvelous group of female colleagues/friends, we founded the “Cazadoras de Estrellas” project. This project aims to travel around Chile making astronomy workshops for high school girls interested in astronomy and sciences. We have been funded through two ESO grants and in 2019, we were shortlisted in the Nature Innovating Science award.

Doing outreach especially for underrepresented groups in science is something that I enjoyed very much. I spend my free time reading novels, cooking new recipes, trying not to kill my plants, and tasting scottish whisky.