Welcome

I am a staff researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA). My day is mostly consumed by the following responsibilities: as a co-chair of the ARRAKIHS Science Comittee, I am co-leading the ARRAKIHS consortium's science teams to ensure ESA's adoption of ARRAKIHS by June 2026. As the pipeline scientist of the J-PAS and J-PLUS surveys, which are being obseved at our own Astrophysical Observatory of Javalambre (OAJ), as well as ARRAKIHS, I am responsible for ensuring that they can deliver high-quality data products: in its 57 narrow-band filters by J-PAS, and ultra-deep in the four ARRAKIHS broad-band filters.

I am also the thesis director of a PhD student and leading two postdoctoral researchers and a research software engineer, while mentoring Google Summer of Code projects with active developers world-wide. I have developed, and am actively maintaining, two large software projects: GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro; for data analysis) and Maneage (Managing data lineage; for the workflow). These are the main tools used in the data reduction pipeline of ARRAKIHS and are being used more regularly within J-PAS and J-PLUS.

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. 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) astrophysical sources through an added "filter" of 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.

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).