Ignacio Mendigutía Gómez

Laboratorio de Astrofísica Espacial y Física Fundamental (LAEFF) 
PhD research fellow


Last year I finished my Physics degree at the Universidad
Complutense de Madrid (UCM), in the Astrophysics branch. I have
just obtained a PhD fellowship to study for four years in LAEFF,
with Benjamin Montesinos as my tutor. During this first year I
will combine my PhD research with the studies of the Astrophysics
Masters degree at the UCM and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.  

During the last year I have also been working in the ISO Data
Centre (IDC) as a pre-graduate trainee, with Alberto Salama as my
tutor, and under the general supervision of Marcus Kirsch. I
worked in the IDC combining measurements from both ISO's short
and long wavelength spectrometers, to derive high S/N ratio spectra
for different sources. 

During the next four years I will study at LAEFF the evolution of
proto-planetary disks around Young Stellar Objects, from pre-main
sequence to Vega-like stars, which I am very interested in. As a
starting point, I will use the observations made by the EXPORT
(EXoPlanetary Observational Research Team) consortium, which
mainly consist of photometry, photo-polarimetry and spectroscopy
in the optical and near infrared bands of a sample of stars in
these different evolutionary stages. Some of these stars were also
monitored during days or even months. These observations were made
during the 1998 international observing time of the Canary Islands
Observatories, and the idea is to study in depth how disks evolve
from dense initial states to planetary systems.