Dr. Rogério Riffel received his PhD in 2008 at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). He was the first fellow of the Programa Nacional de Pós Doutorado da CAPES (PNPD/CAPES) at the Institute of Physics of UFRGS. This programme aims to promote high-level studies and maintain high-profile researchers in Brazil. During his stay as a PNPD fellow, he also worked as a visiting professor in the astronomy department. After this, in 2010 he obtained a permanent position as a lecturer in the astronomy department at UFRGS.

Since then, Dr. Riffel served as head of the astronomy department (2015-2019), vice-coordinator of the Brazilian SOAR time allocation committee (2016-2020), member of the SOAR Scientific Advisory Committee (2018-2021), member of the Brazilian Gemini time allocation committee (2010-2014), member of the physics graduate committee (2021-present). He received a Junior member award from the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, this award is given to very productive and active young Brazilian scientists (up to 40 years old). His research focuses on the study of stellar populations and the physics/chemistry of the gas emission lines of Active Galaxies, from optical to mid-infrared data, in order to understand their impact on galaxy evolution. Dr. Riffel has extensive experience working in the NIR spectral range analysing spectral features in galaxy spectra and has proposed new means to study the stellar populations of galaxies. He has developed a methodology to disentangle the three main components that add up in the NIR spectral energy distribution of galaxies.

He is a member of collaborations such as Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA), Vera Rubin / LSST, and BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS). In order to understand the physics that connects large-scale and circumnuclear star formation and the feeding and feedback processes that may regulate galaxy-SMBH co-evolution, he and his team are conducting a major observational effort to obtain data over a wide wavelength range on a complete, volume-limited sample of AGN and control galaxies.

Dr. Riffel has extensive experience in separating the main components of the spectral energy distribution of AGNs: the accretion disc emission, the hot dust emission, and the stellar population, allowing the study of the individual components. He is a world expert in the study of the near-infrared spectral region, being the first to recognise the 1.1 micron CN feature in the spectra of active galaxies and performing a complete spectral fitting in this spectral region. He and his group have extensive experience in mapping the stellar content of galaxies from the optical to the near-infrared, thus adding important information to the knowledge of the effect of AGN on the star formation and chemical evolution of the host galaxy. These results have been published in more than 130 refereed papers with more than 7000 citations and as part of the projects of the numerous undergraduate and graduate students he has advised.