About Me

I am currently an ESO Fellow with duties in Paranal.

I was a PhD student at Universidad Andres Bello (UNAB) in Chile, under the supervision of Prof. Dante Minniti (UNAB) and Prof. José G. Fernandéz-Trincado (UCN, Chile).

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My research interests are mainly related to the formation and evolution of the Milky Way, using Globular Clusters as powerful tracers of the Galaxy's properties.

I focus on the search and characterization of new candidate globular clusters in the Milky Way and in the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, whose tidally destruction process is still ongoing. My thesis plan is based on photometric and spectroscopic analysis in the near-IR/optical passbands. The first allows individuating potential candidates and deriving their main physical parameters: reddening, distance, luminosity, size, metallicity, age. I was lucky enough to discover two low-luminosity globular clusters, named Garro 01 and Garro 02 in the VVV/VVVX images. The second provides with radial velocities and chemistry information to illuminate the nature of new globular clusters. I am capable to combine astrometry, kinematics, distances and chemistry to reconstruct the chemo-dynamics history of recently analysed globular clusters with galaxy models, for the first time.  On a larger view, an interesting aspect of this kind of studies is to investigate the luminosity function and the metallicity function of the globular cluster system in the Milky Way (and if it will be possible in external systems) in order to increase our knowledge on the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. 

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The interest in the study of globular clusters began during my master thesis. I studied the core of a known Galactic globular cluster, under the supervision of Prof. Barbara Lanzoni (UniBO), Prof. Alessio Mucciarelli (UniBO) and Dr. Cristina Pallanca (UniBO). In particular, this thesis was based on the kinematics study of the central regions of the galactic globular cluster NGC 6440, using the Integral Field Units (IFU) instruments, especially I adopted SINFONI@ESO, KMOS@ESO and FLAMES@ESO spectrographs.

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