Médéric Boquien

Associate Professor at Universidad de Antofagasta (Antofagasta)

mederic.boquien [at] uantof.cl

I am an Associate Professor at the Centro de Astronomía (CITEVA) at Universidad de Antofagasta, which is located in the spectacular Atacama desert where some of the most advanced observatories in the world are located. Before moving to Chile, I was successively a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA), the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (France), and finally at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge (United Kingdom). I earned my PhD from Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot and CEA/Saclay for my work on intergalactic star formation. My main research interest are the study of star formation and the interaction between starlight and dust. For this I combine multi-wavelength observations with various computational techniques such as spectral energy distribution modeling and machine learning.

CIGALE

Modeling the spectral energy distribution (SED) of galaxies is one of the key techniques to estimate their physical properties. I am leading the development of CIGALE (Code Investigating GALaxy emission, Boquien et al. 2019), a public, parallel X-ray-to-radio SED modeling code that can adjust spectro-photometric estimates to extract the physical properties through Bayesian techniques .

LSST

The Legacy Survey of Space and Time that will be carried out at the Vera Rubin observatory will revolutionize many aspects of Astronomy and how we do science. One of the challenges will be measuring the physical properties of the billions of LSST galaxies. For this I am interested in new techniques based on Machine Learning methods that have the potential to accelerate the estimation of physical properties by orders of magnitudes

PHANGS

PHANGS-JWST is observing the first astronomical dataset charting the connections between dust, stars, and cold molecular gas throughout a diversity of galactic environments for 19 galaxies from PHANGS sample at a resolution of ~50 pc or better. In this project I am involved in the modeling of the panchromatic emission of stellar clusters to better understand their formation and evolution and I am interested how the interaction between dust and starlight give rise to attenuation curves.

VESTIGE

VESTIGE is a narrow band imaging survey of the Virgo cluster over ~100 deg² aimed at studying the role of the environment on galaxy evolution. VESTIGE is the first deep blind Hα survey of a nearby cluster. I am interested in particular in the influence of the cluster environment on the star formation history of galaxies and the presence of nuclear activity.