About Me
Biography
I was born in 1998 in Murcia, a city in south-eastern Spain. My interest in academia developed during my adolescence, which led me to begin a degree in Physics at the University of Murcia in 2016. After two years, I transferred to the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) to specialise in fundamental physics and astrophysics during the final years of my degree. I subsequently completed a Master’s degree in Astrophysics at UCM. During this period, I also undertook a six-month internship at ESAC/ESA, where I worked in science communication.
Currently I am half way through my 3rd year of PhD at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA) and University of Porto (UP), under the supervision of Dr. Nuno C. Santos and Dr. Vardan Zh. Adibekyan. My PhD project is linked to the Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET) and focuses on a detailed, line-by-line radial velocity analysis of disk-resolved solar observations, with the aim of reaching the precision required to detect Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars.
As part of my PhD research, I developed TILARA, a template-independent, line-by-line radial velocity extraction code designed to overcome limitations of classical cross-correlation and template-matching methods. TILARA derives radial velocities directly from the behaviour of individual absorption lines, using automated Gaussian fitting and configurable outlier-rejection schemes, without requiring the construction of a reference spectrum. Originally motivated by future disk-resolved solar observations with PoET, the code is flexible and instrument-independent, and has been validated on high-resolution ESPRESSO observations, delivering radial velocity precision comparable to established methods while reducing sensitivity to spectral outliers and enabling detailed studies of stellar surface phenomena such as granulation.
In the next stage of my PhD, I will focus on the study of stellar granulation using disk-resolved solar observations obtained with PoET. By combining these observations with TILARA, this work aims to characterise the imprint of granulation on individual spectral lines and assess its impact on precise radial velocity measurements.