Personal Information

Full name

Africa Castillo-Morales

About me

I have currently the position of Profesor Ayudante Doctor at the Astrophysics Department of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid . I had previously a Juan de la Cierva Associate Professor position at the same Departament.

I obtained the B.S. degree in Physics at the Universidad de Granada (Spain) in 1996. My PhD thesis with title "Galaxies, Clusters of Galaxies and the Magnetic Field Interchange" started at the Astrophysical Institute of Liverpool where I was working during two years, and finished at the Departamento de Física Teórica y del Cosmos of the University of Granada in 2004 under the supervision of Drs. Eduardo Battaner and Sabine Schindler.

My research in this period was focus on the study of the gas and dark matter distribution in nearby clusters of galaxies based on X-ray observations ( Castillo-Morales, A. and Schindler, S. 2003 ). In De Filippis, E., Schindler, S. and Castillo-Morales, A. 2003 and Schindler, S., Castillo-Morales , A. et al. 2001 are analyzed in detail the X-ray observations for two clusters of galaxies morphologically different, CL 0939+4713, dynamically young system and RBS797 (z=0.35), cluster of galaxies where the interaction between the intracluster gas and the central radio galaxy is observed.Furthermore, part of my thesis was dedicated to the study of possible mechanisms of magnetic field interchange between intracluster and intergalactic medium. In collaboration with E. Mediavilla ( IAC ) we have studied gas and stellar kinematics of nuclear regions of galaxies with some kind of activity using the integral field spectroscopy technique ( Castillo-Morales, A. et al. 2007, Jiménez-Vicente, J., Castillo-Morales, A. et al. 2007.)

Since 2005 I have been working at the Departamento de Astrofísica y CC. de la Atmósfera of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid as a "Juan de la Cierva" professorship in collaboration with J. Gallego. My research is centered on Extragalactic Astrophysics, the study of physical properties (extinctions, SFRs, metallicities,...) of star-forming regions in nearby Luminous Compact Blue galaxies using integral field spectroscopy technique. Our group in collaboration with Florida University is involved in the study of a representative sample of Luminous Compact Blue Galaxies (LCBGs) within 100 Mpc selected from the DR4 of the SDSS and the UCM surveys. This project is based on the integral field spectroscopy provided by the instrument UCM2325+2318 (NGC 7673) have been presented in several conferences (e.g Garland, C., Perez-Gallego, J., Castillo-Morales, A., et al. 2007 , Castillo-Morales, A., Gallego, J., et al. (SEA 2008)) and its publication is coming soon.

I am a member of GUAIX , a group dedicated to software development for astronomical instruments. I was working as a project manager of SIDE (Super Ifu Deployable Experiment). This was a multi-purpose middle resolution fibre fed spectrograph dedicated to wide field MOS and three-dimensional spectroscopy. This instrument is now being migrated to a more affordable one. It will operate in the visible and near-IR light and has been proposed as a second generation instrument for the 10 m Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC) on La Palma.

 

Other interests

Travelling (specially to Granada...) and cooking for friends.

History

Member for

16 years 36 weeks