Dr. Vicente Villanueva
Vicente Villanueva is from Rancagua, Chile. He obtained a Bachelor's degree in Science with a major in Astronomy from the Universidad de Chile (2014) and a Master's degree in Astrophysics from the Universidad de Valparaíso (2016), Chile.
He received his doctorate in astronomy at the University of Maryland-College Park, USA, under the tutelage of professors Alberto Bolatto and Stuart Vogel. During this last period, he worked on the systematic analysis of different galaxy samples from the local Universe (e.g., EDGE-CALIFA, VERTICO, ACA-EDGE) and how the physical conditions of the molecular and atomic gas affect star formation.
Currently, Vicente is working as an ANID-ALMA postdoctoral researcher with professor Rodrigo Herrera-Camus, analyzing the physical conditions of the interstellar medium in high redshift galaxies selected from the CRISTAL sample.
CRISTAL's main mission is to establish a systematic census of gas, dust, and stars in galaxies of the early Universe, at scales of kiloparsecs, and based on data taken with ALMA, Hubble Space Telescope, and JWST.
His work is mainly based on the following aspects:
- Analyze the efficiency of dust photoionization and CII excitation to establish how the physical conditions of the dust (temperature, pressure, etc.) affect the metallicity in early galaxies and their behavior as a function of the galactocentric radius.
- Verify how the spatial distributions and kinematic conditions of stars, dust, and molecular gas in CRYSTAL galaxies compare with those found in galaxies of the local Universe.
Research experience:
- As a master's thesis at the Universidad de Valparaíso, he calculated parallactic distances for more than 100 low-mass stars using the multi-epoch catalog in NIR VISTA Variable in the Milky Way (or VVV survey).
- He actively worked on the calibration, imaging, and analysis of the Valparaíso Line Emission Survey (or VALES) galaxy sample.
- He is an active part of the Extragalactic Database for Galaxy Evolution (EDGE) project, being an active observer of the EDGE GBT campaign. In addition, he is a researcher of the ACA EDGE sample to analyze the mechanisms that modulate the transition from galaxies with active star formation (star-formation main sequence) towards massive galaxies but with low/no star production (red cloud galaxies).
- He is an active collaborator of the Virgo Environment Traced In CO survey (VERTICO) project, analyzing the efficiency of star formation and its dependence on environmental factors in selected galaxies of the Virgo cluster (the closest to our Local Group).
- office: 211
- phone: 1646
- e-mail: vicente (point) avl365 (at) gmail (point) com
