I'm a Carnegie Fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, California, USA.
I got my Ph.D. at UT Austin, where I worked on the HETDEX project. HETDEX is a revolutionary survey which uses blank-field integral field spectroscopy (IFS) to detect high-z galaxies by means of their Lyman &alpha emission. Mapping the position of hundreds of thousands of star-forming galaxies at 1.9< z< 3.5 will allow HETDEX to put constraints on the properties of Dark Energy in the early universe. I am currently using data from the HETDEX Pilot Survey to study the properties of these Lyman &alpha Emitters and the radiative processes involved in the escape of Ly&alpha photons from the ISM of high-z galaxies.
I am also the P.I. of the VIRUS-P Exploration of Nearby Galaxies (VENGA), an IFU survey that will spectroscopically map the bulges, bars and outer disks of 30 normal spiral galaxies in the local universe. I am interested in studying the physical processes that regulate the rate at which stars form in different environments inside galaxies. To do this I combine the VENGA spatially resolved optical spectroscopy with maps of these nearby galaxies at radio and sub-mm wavelengths in order to look for correlations between the star formation rate and other quantities like gas surface density, metallicity, velocity fields, etc.
I am also part of the MUSYC collaboration. In MUSYC I was part of the Wide NIR imaging team. As part of my Masters thesis at Universidad de Chile I produced the wide area muli-wavelength K-band selected photometric catalogs catalogs for two of the three MUSYC fields with wide K-band coverage. I also used this data to study the clustering and properties of massive galaxies at z~2. I am still inolved in narrow-band studies of Ly&alpha Emitters and Ly&alpha Blobs using the MUSYC data.
My research interests include high redshift galaxies, large scale structure, observational cosmology, star formation on galactic scales, and galaxy formation and evolution in general.
