Professor of Astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Victoria, Canada.
His career began at the University of Córdoba (Argentina) and includes postdoctoral training at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA) and the universities of Cambridge (UK), Durham (UK), Arizona (USA) and Massachusetts (USA). His academic research focuses on the formation and evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters, as well as the structure of dark matter haloes.
Together with Carlos Frenk and Simon White, he is an author of the NFW profile scientific research, which describes how dark matter is distributed in the haloes surrounding galaxies and galaxy clusters, according to simulations of cosmic structure. He has published more than 350 research papers in specialist journals, which have been cited over 75,000 times in the literature. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences of Argentina and of the Royal Society of Canada, and has received awards from the Humboldt Foundation of Germany and the Royal Society of London. In September 2020 he was included in the list compiled by Citation Laureates for contributions of impact comparable to those of previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
His visit has been driven by the new cross-cutting project “Dark Matter: observations, models and detection” and members of the research lines Milky Way and Local Group, Galaxies, and Astroparticles and Cosmology.
His expertise offers ample avenues for interaction and collaboration with the groups and research lines at the IAC. We will interact with Prof. Navarro on the dynamical modelling of Local Group dwarf galaxies with the objective of placing constraints on their dark matter halo density profiles, as well as on characterising the impact of tidal disturbance on their evolution.
We plan to continue the collaboration with Prof. Navarro, focussing on the connection between the stellar distributions of dwarf galaxies, the kinematics of the stellar component and the dark matter potentials in which they are embedded. Testing existing diagnostic tools against numerical simulations is also within the scope of the visit.
We also plan to work with Prof. Navarro in the analysis of Milky Way thin and thick disks density profiles to disentangle conflicting predictions of galaxy evolution models regarding the thin/thick disk differentiation in disk galaxies. More broadly, we will welcome Prof. Navarro’s advice on the direction of our planned efforts to embark on a suite of Milky Way-like galaxy simulations.
Prof. Navarro has agreed to give a public lecture in the Museo de La Ciencia y el Cosmos as part of the outreach program carried out at the IAC. He will also act as mentor and scientific guide in meetings with PhD students and postdocs.
