Welcome

I am a staff researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA). My research is focused on methods to improve the scientific productivity of the data reduction in optical astronomical imaging; in particular for the study of galaxy evolution which I am most interested in. Therefore, I developed GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro; for data analysis) and Maneage (Managing data lineage; for the workflow) and with them, I am leading the reduction pipeline of ESA's ARRAKIHS mission soon, the OAJ's J-PAS and J-PLUS surveys.

At CEFCA, I am currently the thesis director of a PhD student and leading two postdoctoral researchers and a software engineer, while mentoring Google Summer of Code projects with active developers world-wide. We are using data from J-PLUS, MUSE, HSC, HST, among others.

With the introduction of the telescope, astronomers have not been using their naked eyes for their professional research any more. Since the introduction of digital detectors and the high processing power of modern computers, today we actually "see" (detect/measure) the heavenly bodies (!) through software, not directly through telescopes any more. Therefore, research in the evolution of galaxies inevitably entails deep involvement in the software that practically define your results. In particular as part of my PhD research, I developed a new method (called NoiseChisel) to detect very diffuse and low surface brightness signal that might have any shape. NoiseChisel ultimately grew to become part of a large collection of data analysis tools: Gnuastro. The organization of the complete analysis (workflow) in that paper for a fully reproducible result, lead to the creation of Maneage (described in this paper).