Gaia

I have contributed to the European Space Agency's Gaia mission in several roles, currently as Chairperson of the Executive of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. I was PI of the GaiaUnlimited project and of the MWGaiaDN Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network.

The image was created by me for the promotion of Gaia Early Data Release 3 using the code in this repository which makes use of the epoch propagation functionality in pygaia.

Although Gaia stopped collecting data in January 2025, there are many future space astrometry survey opportunities. This includes combinations of Gaia and the Euclid and Nancy Grace Roman space observatories, and in particular the JASMINE and GaiaNIR missions

Gaia EDR3 star trails

Research interests

  • Space astrometry: Gaia, GaiaNIR, JASMINE
  • Survey astronomy: WEAVE, 4MOST, LSST, Roman
  • Gaia data processing
  • Milky Way structure and evolution
  • Young stars in the solar neighbourhood
  • Applications of Gaia data, including binaries and exoplanets
  • Gaia survey selection function (GaiaUnlimited)
Figure 5 from Microarcsecond Astrometry: Science Highlights from Gaia, Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2021, Volume

Teaching

I currently teach the BSc course Astronomy Lab and Observing Project.

ALOP Brightspace banner image