RESEARCH
SCIENTIFIC FOCUS AREAS
My research connects radio astronomy, computational imaging, and high-performance computing. Use the tabs below to explore each focus area — methods, science goals, and selected publications.
The topic
Magnetic fields are everywhere in space, even where we cannot see them directly. Earth’s field turns a compass needle; the Sun’s field drives flares and the solar wind; on larger scales, galaxies and the gas between them are threaded by fields that influence how stars form and how energy is transported.
The open questions are ambitious: how strong are those fields, how are they arranged across the Milky Way and beyond, and do they help or hold back the birth of stars? Polarised radio light is one of our best witnesses—light that has been nudged by magnetised gas along the way, leaving a trace we can decode. With the SKA, that trace will be readable on a scale we have never had before.
What I do
I develop methods to recover magnetic-field structure from polarised radio data, using techniques such as Faraday tomography and modern computing so that large surveys remain practical. The goal is reliable, reproducible tools that scientists can use on SKA-era data volumes.
Community. Associate member of the SKAO Magnetism Science Working Group (Universidad de Santiago de Chile).
Selected publications
The topic
Protoplanetary discs are flat rings of gas and dust around young stars. That is, the places where planets and moons are born. Picture our own Solar System not long after it formed: the Sun surrounded by a broad disc of material that would later become the planets, asteroids, and moons we know today. A central question is simple to state but hard to answer: under what conditions do planets actually form, and how does a disc go from that early stage to a full planetary system?
Researchers also ask how growing planets interact with the disc, whether moons can form around them, and why some discs show gaps, spirals, or bright spots that change over time. Radio telescopes help by showing dust and gas, and sometimes the glow of material still falling onto a young planet.
What I do
I analyse radio data from telescopes such as ALMA and the VLA on young discs and environments around forming planets, with emphasis on variability, what drives the radio emission, and how the way we build images affects the science. Much of this work is done with the Millennium Nucleus YEMS (Young Exoplanets and their Moons) and collaborators in Chile and abroad.
Selected publications
- Hourly radio variability of PDS70c from time-differential photometry
- Multi-frequency observations of PDS70c: radio emission mechanisms in the circumplanetary environment
- Variable structure in the PDS 70 disc and uncertainties in radio-interferometric image restoration
- The Doppler flip in HD 100546 as a disk eruption: kinematic protoplanet searches
The topic
Radio interferometry builds a telescope from many smaller dishes separated by large distances. In the right arrangement, that array can behave like a single antenna with an aperture as wide as the greatest spacing between elements. The familiar rule applies: larger aperture, finer detail on the sky. That is why ALMA, the VLA, and future arrays such as the SKA are laid out over kilometres or continents instead of being one solid dish.
Each pair of antennas measures only a fragment of the spatial frequencies needed for an image. We never observe the full set, and noise is always present. Mathematically, many different sky brightness patterns can match the same data. In other words, the reconstruction problem does not have a unique solution unless we add sensible assumptions and quantify what remains uncertain. Much of the field is about making that choice explicit so we do not mistake software artefacts for astrophysics.
What I do
I work on imaging algorithms and software that turn raw interferometric visibilities into maps suitable for publication, with emphasis on speed, reproducibility, and checks along the way. I lead development of Pyralysis, a framework aimed at large surveys such as the SKA, and supervise student projects on reconstruction methods and GPU computing.
Selected publications
The topic
You already use compression every day. An MP3 keeps the music without storing every millisecond of sound at full detail; a JPEG shrinks a photo because much of the information is redundant. Compressed sensing asks a related question for science: if the sky, or the magnetic structure along our line of sight, can be described with far fewer numbers than a naive map would suggest, can we still reconstruct it from the limited measurements a telescope actually gives us?
Radio astronomy is a natural place for this. We never sample the sky completely, and noise is always there. The honest question is not only “can we fill in the gaps?” but “when should we trust what comes out, and when are we pushing the data too hard?” That tension shows up clearly in Faraday tomography, where we try to peel apart magnetised gas at different depths using polarised radio waves.
What I do
I write reconstruction methods that exploit structure in the data instead of pretending we measured everything. Much of my work targets Faraday depth recovery for polarimetric surveys, with an eye on surveys that will only grow with the SKA. CS-ROMER is the main tool I have built along this line. It recovers magneto-ionic emission using compressed sensing, has been tested on real survey designs, and is meant to be used, not only described on paper.