Category Archives: Recruitment

Intoducing team members: Vera Patricio

Clusters, MUSE, observations, Recruitment

I was born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, where I completed my physics degree at Instituto Superior Técnico. When the time to do my master thesis arrived, I had the amazing opportunity to work with Myriam Rodrigues, an ESO fellow in Chile, in her project which aimed to understand how much we can know about the stars that make up a galaxy by analysing its total spectrum. It was the first time that I had the change to study galaxies and I was in love with it at once. I even got the chance to stay a few days at the Very Large Telescope, learning about its instruments and about the work of observers. By the end of my Master, I had decided that the coolest job in the world was to observe galaxies and study their evolution. So I found the perfect place to do it here in Lyon, within the CALENDS team: I’ll be looking into very distant galaxies, whose details can only be disentangled thanks to magnification caused by gravitational lensing, and try to place them in the big picture of galaxy evolution.

During my PhD I will analyse several arcs – galaxies that we see very magnified but also very stretched due to distortion introduced by the lensing, and try to figure out what stars compose them, what chemical elements are there and how are their stars and gas moving. To do so, I will mainly use MUSE data, which offers us a unique combination of spectral and spatial analysis, perfect (also!) for this kind of study.

vera

 

  • Congres de doctorants

On October 23, PhD students both from the Observatoire de Lyon  got together to present their work at the 4th ‘Congrès des Doctorants’ (http://doctoraleslyon4.sciencesconf.org).  The congress was split into four sessions, that spanned topics from paleoenvironments to mantle convection, and was open to master students, university professors and researchers. I gave a talk in the ‘Star Wars’ session, cheered up by CALENDerS & Friends, to present my recent work on a galaxy at redshift 3.5 lensed by the SMACS2031 cluster. In the time let for questions, we learned that seismology uses very similar principles to lensing to study the mantle though seismic sound waves, just like we do with light waves!

doctorants

Two 3-years postdoctoral positions available

Jobs, postdocs, Recruitment

Applications are invited for 2 postdoctoral positions in observational cosmology / physics of galaxies, to be part of the CALENDS research group led by J. Richard at Lyon Observatory. CALENDS (Cluster And LENsing Distant Sources) is an ERC-funded project for the analysis of observational data on lensing cluster fields. The applicants will be encouraged to analyze large multiwavelength datasets obtained(or scheduled) on low-luminosity lensed galaxies at 1<z<7 (including HST,Spitzer,Herschel,MUSE,ALMA,KMOS,…) and study their physical properties (both resolved and unresolved) against more massive samples selected in blank fields.

The successful applicants will work in the exciting environment of Lyon Observatory, one of the leading astrophysics Institute in France and the head of the consortium who built the MUSE instrument on VLT. The galaxy formation and cosmology group (GALPAC) is currently hiring 8 postdocs and 4 PhD students, to work on the analysis of MUSE Guaranteed Time Observations as well as numerical simulations.

The positions are available from September 2014 (starting date highly negotiable), initially for 2 years, renewable for a third year, and come with a competitive salary and full benefits.

The applicants should have a PhD in astronomy or astrophysics, in a topic related to galaxy formation and evolution. Applications need to be submitted electronically to johan.richard@univ-lyon1.fr by Dec 15th 2013, as a single PDF including a brief CV, a list of publications as well as a short (3 pages max) statement of research interests. Late applications will be accepted until the posts are filled. The candidates should arrange for three reference letters to be sent by the same date.