Serena Viti
Serena is a Professor of Astronomy at Leiden Observatory at Leiden University and leads the MOPPEX project. She also holds a position at University College London.
Her research interests lie within the field of astrochemistry and galactic and extragalactic star formation studies, both by observations and modelling, with emphasis on the use of chemical and dynamical models to study the clumpy nature of the ISM, and star forming regions. See her publication list for more details.
Mathilde Bouvier
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. My main focus is to investigate the chemical content and the physical properties of nearby galaxies, in pqrticular NGC1068 and NGC253, by targeting various species. In particular, I have a soft spot for carbon chains. I mainly use ALMA observations coupled with chemical models.
I have interest in both extra-galactic and galactic domain, where I come from. During my PhD thesis, I used millimetre and centimetre interferometric observation (ALMA, NOEMA, VLA) of molecular species to study the chemical content of low-mass protostars located in Orion, considered as the closest and best analogue to the Sun’s birth environment.
Joshua Butterworth
He is a PhD student at Leiden Observatory, working with Serena. His work involves using Molecular Line Ratios to investigate the ISM in multi-component galaxies, currently NGC 1068. He is accomplishing this by comparing Archival line intensity detections for many different molecules and transitions of varying spatial resolutions.
He completed his Master’s at Lancaster University, investigating the co-evolution of Supermassive Black Holes and Galaxies in both Bulgeless and Classical Bulge Galaxies via Bayesian Inference of CLOUDY models on X-ray Data..
Katarzyna (Kasia) Dutkowska
Kasia is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden Observatory. She focuses on the modeling of shock chemistry, which can help predict and analyze extragalactic astrochemical observations of shocked regions. She is especially interested in fine-tuning our predictions for dust-related species. Besides, Kasia is interested in observations of molecules in nearby and high-z galaxies.
In her previous projects, Kasia worked on combining observations with modeling to study star formation and chemistry of the Galactic and extragalactic star-forming regions. She developed her own modeling tool, the so-called galaxy-in-a-box model, which predicts molecular emission arising from active and current star formation in galaxies.
Tram Le (Le N. Tram)
My main objective is to study the physics and chemistry of the interstellar medium and comprehend the processes involved in star formation through the use of multiple messengers. My research includes examining how cosmic dust grains are aligned and the polarisation signals induced by these aligned grains across different frequencies and physical scales both within the Milky Way and in other galaxies; studying the influence of the interstellar magnetic field on the development of molecular clouds and the star formation activities that occur there; assessing the spectral features of interstellar gas.
My current project within the Prof. Serena Viti's group at the Leiden University focusses on developing the gas-grain astrochemical model, known as UCLCHEM, aimed at characterising interstellar complex molecules (iCOMs) in star-forming regions.
Please check out my ADS Library if interested.
Yuze Zhang
Yuze is a Ph.D. candidate at Leiden Observatory, researching AGN fueling and accretion processes using high-resolution molecular gas observations and kinematics/radiative transfer modelling. His work, aided by ALMA, contributes to understanding how active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are fueled and how AGN feedback can regulate this process. Yuze is studying the circumnuclear disk (CND) of NGC 1068 as part of MOPPEX, an EU-funded five-year project. His current project focuses on the kinematics and the ISM of this CND.
As a former Master's student at Leiden Observatory and a former member of the LEAPS program hosted jointly by Leiden and ESA's ESTEC, his research focused on LOFAR extragalactic observations and the stellar mid-life "weakened magnetic braking." Before coming to Leiden, he completed a Bachelor's degree in Physics and Astronomy from the University of British Columbia, where he received an NSERC scholarship for a summer internship at CHIME.