Objective
"Understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the big challenges and opportunities in astronomy today. One of the main pathways to pick up this challenge is to study in detail the stellar populations in galaxies in the local universe. Two questions we would particularly like to answer but cannot at the present time are:
1) How old is the oldest significant population of stars in each galaxy and what is its mass fraction?
2) What is the enrichment history of each galaxy, i.e. what is the relation between the stellar ages and the stellar element abundances per galaxy?
My research program centers on answering these questions through assembling observational data that can completely characterize the stellar content of galaxy disk over their full spatial extent (the largest Integral Field Spectroscopy Survey ever undertaken), through developing novel methods to extract the full information content from these and other data (full spectral fitting, accurate stellar population models) and through developing methods that allow to mimick the observational process on simulated galaxies (through close collaboration with the simulators).
Obtaining a Career Integration Grant would allow me to pursue this research program in a much more agressive manner by maintaining and extending my collaborations within Europe and within my host institution AIP and its surrounding research area in Potsdam alike. Specifically, the CIG would allow me to 1) extend my role as Project Scientist for the pan-European CALIFA collaboration 2) keep and extend my network of European collaborators in the field of stellar population modelling and analysis 3) prepare for the upcoming opportunities in the context of the MUSE@VLT instrument, the MaNGA project and the instrument studies Fireball/ERASMUS-F 4) develop a method to ""observe"" simulated galaxies and 5) format our complex datasets in a manner immediately comprehensible to non-specialized astronomers and the educated public alike."
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG
See other projects for this call
Coordinator
14482 Potsdam
Germany