I'm a Lecturer at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA) and the Physics Department of the Universidad de Cantabria. I do my research with the IFCA Observational Astronomy and Cosmology Group.
My research interests include different areas of cosmology, astronomy
and statistical signal processing. I focus on the study of the Cosmic
Microwave Background (CMB) with particular interest on solving the
inverse problems related to the blind and non-blind separation of the
different astrophysical components that are mixed with the CMB. I am
particularly interested in the detection/separation of the so-called
compact sources, i.e. galaxies and galaxy clusters, that appear in CMB
images. I have contributed to the development of a number of statistical
signal processing techniques specifically tailored for this problem.
Among these techniques are linear and non-linear filtering methods, data
fusion, Bayesian inference and sparse approximations.
I'm part of the European Space Agency (ESA) Planck
collaboration that since 2009 is scanning the microwave sky with and
angular resolution of a few arcminutes and sensitivity down to tens of
microkelvins. I belong to the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) consortium with 'Planck scientist'
status. My duties inside the collaboration include the development of
codes for the detection of compact sources and the elaboration and
validation of catalogues of extragalactic sources.
I'm also a member of the Herschel ATLAS project. The ATLAS survey is mapping a 550 square degrees area, four times larger than all the other Herschel
extragalactic surveys combined. Once completed, the ATLAS survey will
contain more than 250,000 galaxies from the nearby Universe out to
redshifts of 3 to 4, when the Universe was only a few billion years old.
I participate in the QUIJOTE experiment,
a ground-base experiment devoted to measure the polarization of the
CMB. My interests in QUIJOTE are the study of polarized extragalactic
radio sources and related data processing topics.
My teaching at the University of Cantabra includes courses on Quantum
Physics, Observational Astronomy, General Relativity, Cosmology and
Data Analysis at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
