Serena Viti
Serena is a Professor of Astronomy at Leiden Observatory at Leiden University and leads the MOPPEX project. She also holds a position at University College London.
Her research interests lie within the field of astrochemistry and galactic and extragalactic star formation studies, both by observations and modelling, with emphasis on the use of chemical and dynamical models to study the clumpy nature of the ISM, and star forming regions. See her publication list for more details.
Monica Huang
Monica is a Taiwanese citizen and an astronomer. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. Her main focus is to investigate the chemical & physical properties in nearby galaxies with interferometric observations from ALMA, along with modeling analysis.
She used to work with spectral-line polarization data from ALMA, VLA, and CARMA to study the magnetic field morphology around star-forming regions and the circumstellar envelope of AGB stars.
Photo credit: Nina Chanlin
Mojtaba Raouf
Mojtaba is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden Observatory at Leiden University. He is focusing on the chemical evolution of molecular gas in hydrodynamic simulations through a small-scale gas disc around a supermassive black hole in a galaxy.
He used to work on a physically motivated model for AGN outflow and feedback in the semi-analytic galaxy evolution model. Mojtaba has experienced studying the stellar population properties and kinematics of galaxies hosted by different groups and clusters using observational galaxy surveys and cosmological simulations.
Mathilde Bouvier
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. My main focus is to investigate the chemical content and the physical properties of nearby galaxies, in pqrticular NGC1068 and NGC253, by targeting various species. In particular, I have a soft spot for carbon chains. I mainly use ALMA observations coupled with chemical models.
I have interest in both extra-galactic and galactic domain, where I come from. During my PhD thesis, I used millimetre and centimetre interferometric observation (ALMA, NOEMA, VLA) of molecular species to study the chemical content of low-mass protostars located in Orion, considered as the closest and best analogue to the Sun’s birth environment.
Katarzyna (Kasia) Dutkowska
Kasia is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden Observatory. She focuses on the modeling of shock chemistry, which can help predict and analyze extragalactic astrochemical observations of shocked regions. She is especially interested in fine-tuning our predictions for dust-related species. Besides, Kasia is interested in observations of molecules in nearby and high-z galaxies.
In her previous projects, Kasia worked on combining observations with modeling to study star formation and chemistry of the Galactic and extragalactic star-forming regions. She developed her own modeling tool, the so-called galaxy-in-a-box model, which predicts molecular emission arising from active and current star formation in galaxies.
Joshua Butterworth
He is a PhD student at Leiden Observatory, working with Serena. His work involves using Molecular Line Ratios to investigate the ISM in multi-component galaxies, currently NGC 1068. He is accomplishing this by comparing Archival line intensity detections for many different molecules and transitions of varying spatial resolutions.
He completed his Master’s at Lancaster University, investigating the co-evolution of Supermassive Black Holes and Galaxies in both Bulgeless and Classical Bulge Galaxies via Bayesian Inference of CLOUDY models on X-ray Data..
Johannes Heyl
Johannes is a second-year PhD student based in the Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Intensive Science at UCL. His research focusses on developing accelerated Bayesian inference techniques to determine the rate parameters of grain-surface reactions for large chemical networks.
Johannes also has an interest in applying data science techniques to other areas, having worked with the Office of National Statistics to determine what insights about what insights can be gathered from Twitter data and will be working with the NHS as part of the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) programme.
Marcus Keil
Marcus is a second year PhD student at University College London. He focuses on creating statistical tools and machine learning algorithms to be used in modelling astrochemical objects and comparing them to observations. His work is part of an ITN called “Astrochemical Origins” (ACO), a large-scale project aiming to unveil the early history of the solar system, while training a new generation of researchers.
Marcus’s interests in machine learning span beyond just their applications, and goes into the engineering of them, and how to improve the performance through the use of GPU as well. To further develop in those areas, he will be working with Mellanox as part of a secondment.
Louise Lamblin
Louise is a 1st year PhD candidate at Leiden Observatory. She completed her MSci in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow in 2020.
Her main interests include the physics surrounding AGNs, galactic outflows and jets, and her thesis project currently focuses on using ALMA CO observations to study the kinematics of the nearby Seyfert galaxy NGC 1068.
Ross O'Donoghue
Ross is a second year PhD student at University College London. His research focuses on the early stages of low mass star formation, understanding the processes at work and their chemical significance.
His PhD is part of an ITN called "Astrochemical Origins" (ACO), a large-scale project aiming to unveil the early history of the solar system and train a new generation of researchers. His role within ACO is the development of astrochemical models and using these to determine the physical characteristics of a developing system.
Victorine Buiten
Victorine is a 1st year PhD candidate at Leiden Observatory under the joint supervision of Serena and Paul van der Werf. She studies the interstellar medium of local ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs), combining astrochemical modelling with JWST observations.
Her interests lie in extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology. Having done both her BSc and MSc in astronomy in Leiden, she has experience with a variety of topics and techniques, including AGN, (proto)clusters and machine learning.
Gijs Vermariën
Gijs is a first year PhD student at the Leiden Observatory. His research interests lie on the boundary between machine learning and astrophysics. His current work focuses on applying machine learning to computationally expensive modelling and simulation in the context of astrochemistry.
He has a MSc degree in Astronomy & Data Science from the Leiden Observatory and a BSc degree in Applied Physics from the Eindhoven University of Technology. Prior research experience includes simulating gravitational waves with AMUSE, neutrino flavour classification in KM3NeT and surrogate modelling for plasma chemistry.