Profile

Every galaxy in the universe has a black hole in their centre and in some of them this black hole seems to be active, swallowing large amounts of gas, even whole stars. These processes release huge amounts of energy, which are enough to destroy the whole galaxy, so they have to affect the evolution go the galaxies. I am trying to find signatures of this interaction using different observational techniques to isolate different processes in the galaxies that release energy.

A typical day starts with browsing the archive of scientific papers and reading the most interesting ones in order to keep up to date with the research in my field. Then it is a lot of data analysis in order to extract the interesting signals out of usually noisy data. This requires a lot of computer programming. I also discuss with other scientists about my work and theirs and sometimes interesting ideas come out of those discussions; they often are informal discussions over coffee… When enough analysis is done, I write papers to be published in journals and give talks about my work to the colleagues in my department or conferences.