image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Research

I study distant galaxies to understand how their properties evolve through cosmic time. At the moment I focus on the motions of ionised gas in disk galaxies, while looking back 7 billion years in cosmic history with the LEGA-C survey. These motions give clues about how efficiently new stars are being formed inside these galaxies, and about their dark matter content.

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image credit: Iztok Bončina/ESO

LEGA-C

The Large Early Galaxy Astrophysics Census (LEGA-C) is an international effort to obtain deep, high-resolution optical spectra of thousands of distant galaxies with the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The aims of LEGA-C are to measure the history of star formation in individual galaxies; to understand why and how galaxies eventually cease to form new stars; and the role of mergers in their subsequent evolution.

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Photo taken at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands.

About me

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the galaxy evolution group of Prof. dr. Arjen van der Wel at Ghent University in Belgium and survey manager of the LEGA-C survey. I am interested in empirical studies of galaxies. My research is based on large galaxy surveys, while looking as much as 12 billion years back in time.
I obtained my PhD in astronomy from Leiden University in the Netherlands in March 2016. I have previously been employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg in Germany and I have some additional experience working as a data scientist for utility corporation Stedin in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.