IN CONSTRUCTION

Welcome to my personal web page.

I am a senior astronomer at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) at the Observatorio Roque de los Muchachos (ORM) on the Island of La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain.

I have served as ING Director 2009 to 2024.

The ING is a unit of the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the UK (STFC), one of the research councils within the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI).

ING manages and operates the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) and the 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) under an agreement between the STFC, the Nederlandse Wetenschapen Organisatie (NWO), an the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC).

Under my tenure ING took a leading role in the development of WEAVE, a STFC-led multi-fibre spectroscopic facility for the WHT capable of obtaining up to 960 spectra of celestial targets simultaneously. WEAVE will carry out massive spectroscopic surveys in multi-object, mini-IFU and large-IFU modes, to study stellar evolution, the Milky Way, galaxy evolution and cosmology.

WEAVE was mounted on the WHT in 2022, and started scientific observations in late 2023, an event marked by a colorful inauguration ceremony.

The first scientific results from WEAVE data were published in 2024.

During my tenure the INT was thoroughly transformed into a robotic telescope by the Terra Hunting Consortium (THE). Under agreement with the ING, the INT will host HARPS3, a stabilised high-resolution echelle spectrograph for extra-solar planet work. HARPS3 is expected at the INT during 2025.

I am an Affiliated Researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Tenerife.