Research

My research has focused on understanding stars. They are the candles of the Universe, becoming central for astrophysical studies, spanning from exoplanets (which orbit around stars) to galaxies (which are so beautiful because of how their stars are distributed). These complex balls of hot gas are further responsible for the production of chemical elements which make up our bodies. While I have contributed to research on neutron stars (Jofre et al 2006), on stars as probes for exoplanet material (Bonsor et al 2021) and on stellar structure and evolution (Jofre et al 2023), my research has been mainly focused on contributing to stellar spectroscopy (e.g. Soubiran et al 2024, Heiter et al 2021, Jofre et al 2019, Jofre et al 2017, Blanco-Cuaresma et al 2014). This is because we can use stars as fossil records for galaxy formation (Hawkins 2015, Das 2020, Jofre 2021, Jackson 2021, de Brito et al 2024, Vitali et al 2024). Currently, my main sources of funding come from the Chilean Ministry of Sciences ANID. Among them, the substantial ones are the FONDECYT Regular Number 1231057 to develop samples of reference stars and the Millennium Initiative NCN2021_017 called Millennium Nucleus for the Evolutionary Reconstruction of the InterStellar medium (ERIS), which is an interdisciplinary project borrows tools from evolutionary biology to study the history of galaxies.