The people behind CHESS

Besides the P.I., the CHESS team includes positions for two Ph.D. students and two post-docs.

Current members

  • John E. Martínez Fernández (PhD student)
John joined the CHESS team in October 2021 when he started his Ph.D. studies in the SAGA Team within the Geoplanet Doctoral School hosted at the CAMK/PAN. The topic of his on-going Ph.D. research is chemical abundances in stars of open clusters. He is using the CHESS pipeline to obtain high-quality abundances of relatively metal-rich stars in open clusters to study radial abundance gradients of the Milky Way and the chemical tagging idea.

  • Sergen Özdemir (PhD student)
Sergen joined the CHESS team in October 2021 when he started his Ph.D. studies in the SAGA Team within the Geoplanet Doctoral School hosted at the CAMK/PAN. The topic of his on-going Ph.D. research is a study of the chemical properties of globular clusters. He is using the CHESS pipeline to obtain high-quality abundances of relatively metal-poor stars in globular clusters to study the intrinsic variation of elements in clusters and the multiple population phenomenon.

  • Rodolfo Smiljanic (PI)
Rodolfo is an associate professor at CAMK/PAN. As the P.I., he is the main responsible for the project, following up the progress to guarantee the tasks are successfully completed. He is also responsible for mentoring the team members, offering supervision and assistance in their studies and research.

Past members

Maria Luiza joined the CHESS team in March 2021 and finished her contract on March 2023. She has a Ph.D. degree in astrophysics from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She brought to the team experience with machine learning, statistical methods, and analysis of stellar populations. During her work in the CHESS team, her main line of research was on the analysis of stellar radial mixing (or stellar migration). She is now a Fondecyt fellow in Chile. Click here to visit her webpage.

  • Hélio Dotto Perottoni (Postdoc)
Hélio joined the CHESS team in April 2023 and left in November of the same year. He has a Ph.D. degree in astrophysics from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He brought to the team experience with metal-poor stars, stellar populations and Galactic chemical evolution. During his work in the CHESS team, his research concerned chemical tagging in the thin disc and finding metal-poor stars using survey data. He is now a postdoc at the University of São Paulo.