About me

Patricia
Iglesias Navarro

I am a PhD student in astrophysics at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), supervised by Prof. Marc Huertas-Company and Prof. Johan H. Knapen. My research focuses on galaxy formation and evolution, where I use data-driven approaches to measure stellar population properties.

Education & Research

I started my bachelor's degree in Physics at La Universidad de La Laguna in 2017, coursing several subjects related to Astronomy and Computer Science for data analysis. My bachelor's thesis (2021) consisted of searching for a compaction phase in the evolution of galaxies, known as 'Blue Nuggets', in the TNG50 cosmological simulation using Deep Learning (CNNs). In the same year, I did 250 hours of internship at the Instituto Astrofísico de Canarias (IAC), where I used self-supervised contrastive representation learning for a morphological classification of COSMOS galaxies with the observational features of Euclid Survey.

I did my master's degree (2021-2023) in Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology at La Universidad de La Laguna, together with a research scholarship at the IAC, where I classified barred galaxies and reconstructed SFHs of galaxies from their optical spectra using IllustrisTNG simulation. My master's thesis was a continuation of that project where I used likelihood-free inference to estimate the SFHs of galaxies from their optical absorption spectra, training the model on simulated galaxies from MILES templates and non-parametric SFHs, and using it to predict the SFH and the metallicity of ETGs from the SDSS.

PhD in Astrophysics

I started my PhD program in Astrophysics at the IAC in November 2023, to work on likelihood-free inference applied to JWST and Euclid photometry. Using novel data-driven approaches applied to data of the most advanced space observatories, my ultimate goal is to infer stellar population properties of observed galaxies, along with their uncertainties, helping to constrain the mechanisms of galaxy formation and evolution.

Patricia Iglesias Navarro

Education & Research

PhD in Astrophysics

Patricia
Iglesias Navarro